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Philosophia Hermetica 

A Course of Ten Lessons, Being An Intro- 

duction to "The Philosophy 

of Alchemy* 9 



BY 

Dr. A. S. Raleigh 

(Hach Mactzin El Dorado Can.) 

Eierophant of the Mysteries of Isis, 




Publishers 

HERMETIC PUBLISHING COMPANY 

San Francisco, Calif. 



Distributors 

STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY 

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1916 



*?i* 



COPYRIGHT. 1916 by A. S. RALEIGH 
Copyrighted and Registered at Stationers' Hall, London, England. 
(All Rights Reserved) 



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TRIES. SIGNATORIES TO 
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the STERLING press 

MAY 29 1916 
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In evidence whereof it is strictly 
understood these Private Lessons 
must not be loaned as they come 
to you fully magnetised, and the 
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CONTENTS 

THOUGH UNMANIFEST GOD IS MOST MANIFEST. 

Text page 7 

Lesson I. The God Beyond All Name 13 

Lesson II. The Manifestation of God 27 

Lesson III. The Manifest God 37 

Lesson IV. The Unmanifest God 52 

Lesson V. The Immanence of God 61 



IN GOD ALONE IS GOOD AND ELSEWHERE 
NOWHERE. 

Text 75 

Lesson VI. The Nature of the Good 79 

Lesson VII. The Pleroma of the Bad 87 

Lesson VIII. The Inherent Badness of Man 95 

Lesson IX. The Beautiful and the Good 107 

Lesson X. The Gnosis of the Good 115 



DEDICATION 

To G. R. S. Mead, who through the publica- 
tion of his edition of the Sermons and Frag- 
ments of Hermes Trismegistos, under the title 
of Thrice Greatest Hermes; made it possible for 
the English Reading Public to gain access to 
the rich mine of Hermetic Wisdom contained 
therein; and in this way did a great deal in 
the great work of bringing the transcendental 
truths of Hermetic Philosophy to the knowl- 
edge of the Modern world ; who also through 
his work in reproducing the Gnosis through 
the medium of his writings on the Gnostic 
Fragments, but especially in his editing of the 
Gnostic Fragments ; thus aiding in the resto- 
ration of the Gnosis of the Mind, this series 
of Lessons on Hermetic Philosophy is lovingly 
dedicated. 

By the Author. 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

Though Unmanifest God Is Most Manifest. 

(Text: G. R. S. Mead. Thrice Greatest Her- 
mes; Corpus Hermeticum (VI); G. Par- 
they, Hermetis Trismegisti, 41-48; Pat- 
rizzi, Nova de Universis Philosophia, 12b- 
13b.) 

1. I will recount to thee this sermon (logos) 
too, Tat, that thou mayest cease to be with- 
out the mysteries of the God beyond all name. 
And mark thou well how That which to the 
many seems unmanifest, will grow most mani- 
fest for thee. 

Now, were It manifest, It would not be. For 
all that is made manifest is subject to becom- 
ing, for it hath been made manifest. But the 
Unmanifest forever is, for It doth not desire 
to be made manifest. It ever is, and maketh 
manifest all other things. 

Being Himself unmanifest, as ever being 
and ever making-manifest, Himself is not 
made manifest. God is not made Himself; 
by thinking-manifest, He thinketh all things 
manifest. 

Now "thinking-manifest" deals with things 
made alone, for thinking-manifest is nothing 
else than making. 

2. He, then, alone who is not made, 'tis 
clear, is both beyond all power of thinking- 
manifest, and is unmanifest. 

And as He thinketh all things manifest, He 
manifests through all things and in all, and 
most of all in whatsoever things He wills to 
manifest. 



8 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

Do thou, then, Tat, my son, pray first unto 
our Lord and Father, the One-and-Only One, 
from whom the One doth come, to show His 
mercy unto thee, in order that thou mayest 
have the power to catch a thought of this so 
mighty God, one single beam of Him to shine 
into thy thinking. For thought alone "sees" 
the Unmanif est, in that it is itself unmanif est. 

If, then, thou hast the power, He will, Tat, 
manifest to thy mind's eyes. The Lord be- 
grudges not Himself to anything, but mani- 
fests Himself through the whole world. 

Thou hast the power of taking thought, of 
seeing it and grasping it in thy own "hands," 
and gazing face to face upon God's Image. 
But if what is within thee even is unmanif est 
to thee, how, then, shall He Himself who is 
within thy self be manifest for thee by means 
of [outer] eyes? 

3. But if thou wouldst "see" Him, bethink 
thee of the sun, bethink thee of moon's course, 
bethink thee of the order of the stars. Who 
is the One who watcheth o'er that order? For 
every order hath its boundaries marked out 
by place and number. 

The sun's the greatest god of gods in heaven ; 
to whom all the heavenly gods give place as 
unto king and master. And he, this so-great 
one, he greater than the earth and sea, en- 
dures to have above him circling smaller stars 
than him. Out of respect to Whom, or out of 
fear of Whom, my son, [doth he do this] ? 

Nor like nor equal is the course each of 
these stars describes in heaven. Who [then] 
is He who marketh out the manner of their 
course and its extent? 

4. The Bear up there that turneth round 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 



itself, and carries round the whole cosmos 
with it — Who is the owner of this instru- 
ment? Who He who hath set round the sea 
its bounds? Who He who hath set on its 
seat the earth? 

For, Tat, there is someone who is the 
Maker and the Lord of all these things. It 
could not be that number, place and measure 
could be kept without someone to make them. 
No order whatsoever could be made by that 
which lacketh place and lacketh measure; 
nay; even this is not without a Lord, my son. 
For if the orderless lacks something, in that 
it is not lord of order's path, it also is beneath 
a lord — the one who hath not yet ordained it 
order. 

5. Would it were possible for thee to get 
thee wings, and soar into the air, and, poised 
midway 'tween earth and heaven, behold the 
earth's solidity, the sea's fluidity (the flowing 
of its streams), the spaciousness of air, fire's 
swiftness, [and] the coursing of the stars, the 
swiftness of heaven's circuit round them 
[all] ! 

Most blessed sight were it, my son, to see 
all these beneath one sway — the motionless in 
motion, and the unmanifest made manifest; 
whereby is made this order of the cosmos and 
the cosmos which we see of order. 

6. If thou would'st see Him too through 
things that suffer death, both on the earth 
and in the deep, think of a man's being fash- 
ioned in the womb, my son, and strictly scru- 
tinize the art of Him who fashions him, and 
learn who fashioneth this fair and godly 
image of the Man. 

Who [then] is He who traceth out the cir- 



10 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

cles of the eyes; who He who boreth out the 
nostrils and the ears; who He who openeth 
[the portal of] the mouth ; who He who doth 
stretch out and tie the nerves; who He who 
channels out the veins; who He who hardeneth 
the bones ; who He who covereth the flesh with 
skin; who He who separates the fingers and 
the joints ; who He who widens out a treading 
for the feet; who He who diggeth out the 
ducts ; who He who spreadeth out the spleen ; 
who He who shapeth heart like to a pyramid ; 
who He who setteth ribs together; who He 
who wideneth the liver out; who He who mak- 
eth lungs like to a sponge ; who He who mak- 
eth belly stretch so much; who He who doth 
make prominent the parts most honorable, so 
that they may be seen, while hiding out of 
sight those of least honor? 

7. Behold how many arts [employed] on 
one material, how many labors on one single 
sketch ; and all exceeding fair, and all in per- 
fect measure, yet all diversified ! Who made 
them all? what mother, or what sire, save 
God alone, unmanifest, who hath made all 
things by His Will? 

8. And no one saith a statue or a picture 
comes to be without a sculptor or [without] a 
painter; doth [then] such workmanship as 
this exist without a Worker? What depth of 
blindness, what deep impiety, what depth of 
ignorance! See, then, thou ne'er, son Tat, 
deprivest works of Worker! 

Nay, rather is He greater than all names, 
so great is He, the Father of them all. For 
verily He is the Only One; and this His work, 
to be a father. 

9. So, if thou f orcest me somewhat too bold, 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 11 

to speak, His being is conceiving of all things 
and making [them]. 

And as without its maker it is impossible 
that anything should be, so ever is He not un- 
less He ever makes all things, in heaven, in 
air, in earth, in deep, in all of cosmos, in 
every part that is and that is not of every- 
thing. For there is naught in all the world 
that is not He. 

He is Himself, both things that are and 
things that are not. The things that are He 
hath made manifest, He keepeth things that 
are not in Himself. 

He is the God beyond all name ; He the un- 
manifest, He the most manifest; He whom 
the mind [alone] can contemplate, He visible 
unto the eyes [as well] ; He is the one of no 
body, the one of many bodies, nay, rather He 
of every body. 

Naught is there which He is not. For all 
are He and He is all. And for this cause hath 
He all names, in that they are one Father's. 
And for this cause hath He Himself no name, 
in that He's Father of [them] all. 

Who, then, may sing Thee praise of Thee, or 
[praise] to Thee? 

Whither, again, am I to turn my eyes to sing 
Thy praise; above, below, within, without? 

There is no way, no place [is there] about 
Thee, nor any other thing of things that are. 

All [are] in Thee; all [are] from Thee; 
Thou who givest all takest naught, for Thou 
hast all and naught is there Thou hast not. 

11. And when, Father, shall I hymn Thee? 
For none can seize Thy hour or time. 

For what, again, shall I sing hymn? For 
things that Thou hast made, or things Thou 



12 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

hast not? For things Thou hast made mani- 
fest, or things Thou hast concealed? 

How, further, shall I hymn Thee? As being 
of myself? As having something of mine 
own? As being other? 

For that Thou art whatever I may be ; Thou 
art whatever I may do ; Thou art whatever I 
may speak. 

For Thou art all, and there is nothing else 
which Thou art not. Thou art all that which 
doth exist, and Thou art what doth not exist, 
— Mind when Thou thinkest, and Father when 
Thou makest, and God when Thou dost ener- 
gize, and Good and Maker of all things. 

(For that the subtler part of matter is the 
air, of air the soul, of soul the mind, and of 
mind God.) 



LESSON I 
The God Beyond All Name 

Text: 

1. I will recount for thee this sermon 
(logos) too, Tat, that thou may'st cease to 
be without the mysteries of the God beyond 
all name. And mark thou well how That 
which to the many seems unmanifest, will 
grow most manifest for thee. 

Now, were It manifest, It would not be. For 
all that is made manifest is subject to becom- 
ing, for it hath been made, manifest. But the 
Unmanifest for ever is, for It doth not desire 
to be made manifest. It ever is, and maketh 
manifest all other things. 

Being Himself unmanifest, as ever being 
and ever making-manifest, Himself is not 
made manifest. God is not made Himself; 
by thinking-manifest, He thinketh all things 
manifest. 

Now "thinking-manif est" deals with 
things made alone, for thinking-manifest is 
nothing else than making. 

I will recount for thee this sermon (logos) 
too, Tat, that thou may'st cease to be with- 
out the mysteries of the God beyond all name. 
And mark thou well how that which to the 
many seems unmanifest, will grow most man- 
ifest for thee. 

13 



14 PHILOSOPHIA EEBMETICA 

The subject matter of this sermon is the mys- 
tery of the God beyond all name. To enable one to 
understand the nature of the God beyond all name 
is the purpose of this discourse, and this knowl- 
edge must ever be the basic principle in Hermetic 
Philosophy. Without this understanding we can- 
not advance in the study of our subject. All of 
our Philosophy is based upon this knowledge and 
therefore, our first step must be to understand 
this mystery. First of all, we must understand 
just what is meant by being beyond all name. 

Words are composed of determinate numbers of 
syllables, each syllable representing a determinate 
sound. In spoken language, a definate sound is the 
result of a determinate modification of the breath, 
in such a manner as to produce that specific sound. 
Words are therefore combinations of sounds, and 
hence, combinations of definite modifications of 
the breath. Breath is air in motion, hence it has 
become the symbol of all energy acting under the 
impulse of an inward and outward motion, in other 
words the periodicity of Centripetal and Centrif- 
ugal motion. A word then, will be the synthesis 
of two or more modifications of force, the result 
being a complex or synthetic modification of force. 
We are told that words are the signs of Ideas, 
which means that an Idea causes the modification 
of force essential to give dynamic expression to it, 
and hence words are in reality the names of Ideas, 
and are at all times the correspondents of the 
Ideas which they express. In other words, the 
Ideative Faculty creates an Idea, which acts upon 
the dynamic will force, in such a way as to give 
dynamic expression to it, which, acting upon the 
vocal organs, causes a modification of the breath 
in such a manner as to express that Idea through 
the medium of corresponding sound. Words then 
are the living expressions of corresponding Ideas. 
Man thinks not as he will, but as he must. The 
Ideative Faculty in man, is but the reflection of 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 15 

the Ideative Principle of the Kosmos, the Logos 
in fact. In other words, there is an absolute Law 
governing the formation of Ideas, and they can 
be formed in no other way. The Eacial Mind 
operates as a nnit, and Language is the expres- 
sion of this Eacial Mind. A Language is not an 
invention, but an Evolution, the Infallible coun- 
terpart of the evolving Psychology of the Eace. 
It is for this reason that every effort to form an 
International Language has proved a failure and 
always will fail. Language evolves in accordance 
with an absolute law, and no language can ever 
evolve in any manner different than it has. A 
word in any given language could not possibly 
be any thing except just what it is, and could 
not possibly have any other meaning. Where a 
false meaning has been given to a word, it is 
simply due to the fact that the people do not un- 
derstand their own language. Words change 
through usage because the Ideas of the people 
change, and of course the language, the mission 
of which is to express the Ideas of the people 
who use it, changes automatically with their 
Ideas. Of course there are technical words that 
have been arbitrarily given, but in the main this 
principle enunciated here will apply. 

Words are given to objects as distinguishing 
names, and in the main the word is given which 
corresponds to the attributes of the object so 
named. In other words, there is a perfect cor- 
respondence between the dynamic power of the 
word and the dynamic power of that to which it 
is applied. A name then can only be applied to 
something the attributes of which are in corre- 
spondence with the dynamic elements of the word 
which is used as the name for it. Names there- 
fore can only be given to things whose natures 
are to be determined by comparison or contrast 
with other things. We cannot give a name to 
the Absolute God, because that would in the very 



16 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

nature of things bring Him into relation with 
other things, and by asserting that He was pos- 
sessed of certain attributes, deny to Him all 
other attributes. As all attributes emanate from 
Him, we cannot do this. We cannot even give to 
Him all names, because this would limit Him to 
the Pleroma of things, and He is much more 
than this, being Source of all, rather than the All 
of things. Hence is He the One beyond all name, 
or the Nameless One. 

This Nameless One, who is to the world un- 
manifest, seeing that It does not manifest Itself 
to their consciousness, owing to the fact that 
their consciousness is made up of the conscious- 
ness of things, will, however, become most mani- 
fest to the one who is able to get back of the 
mystery through Spiritual Abstraction. 

Now were It manifest, It would not be. For 
all that is made manifest is subject to becom- 
ing, for it hath been made manifest. But the 
Unmanifest forever is, for It doth not desire 
to be made manifest. It ever is, and maketh 
manifest all things. 

Manifestation is one condition, Beness is an- 
other. All manifestation is becoming. The 
manifestations are merely sequences of becom- 
ings, while permanency is true of the Unmani- 
fest alone. Manifestation subsists in the act of 
becoming. All becomings are related to other 
becomings, and hence all becomings are related 
to time. When any thing becomes, or comes into 
being, it is made manifest at the time of its be- 
coming. All such becomings, or manifestations, 
are in the nature of effects, related to corre- 
sponding causes. Hence they are the effects of 
causation. On the other hand, the Unmanifest 
is perpetually the same. It is not subject to 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETIGA 17 

change, or alteration. It is not in the nature of 
an effect, but is the Causeless Cause of all ef- 
fects. All manifestations come from It, and yet 
It is never manifested at all. The reason why It 
can never become manifested is not hard to dis- 
cover. To be made manifest is to become. To 
become is to become something that was not pre- 
vious to such act of becoming. Nothing can be- 
come any thing without assuming a difference 
from its previous state. The Unmanifest can 
therefore never manifest itself, because to do so 
would mean that It must become something other 
than It is in Itself, hence when the manifestation 
has become, it would not be the same as It was 
previous to such manifestation. Therefore, 
while the Unmanifest is never manifested, It is 
the Manifestor of all things manifested. It is 
forever and unchangeably the same, and all the 
manifestations come forth from It and in this 
way come into being, becoming what they are. 
Being an unchangeable Essence, the Unmani- 
fest can never become any thing, but must ever 
remain unchangeably what It is, hence to It 
manifestation is out of the question. It must 
ever be the One Causeless Causation of all the 
causes operating in the manifestation. 

Being Himself unmanifest, as ever being 
and ever making-manifest, Himself is not 
made manifest. God is not made Himself; by 
thinking-manifest, He thinketh all things 
manifest. 

God is in Himself unmanifest as we have pre- 
viously indicated, for His nature is to ever be 
eternally the same and to perpetually make 
manifest. He Himself is not made manifest, but 
His true nature ever remains in the unmanifest 
state. God Himself is not made, He for ever is, 
unchangeably the same. He causes all things to 



\ 



18 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

come into manifestation by thinking them into 
manifestation, for His thought must ever be- 
come manifest as the thing thought of. 

Now "thinking-manifest" deals with things 
made alone, for thinking-manifest is nothing 
else than making. 

Thinking-manifest, that is thinking into mani- 
festation is the very process of making, nothing 
is made in any other way. The process through 
which God makes all things is by thinking them, 
and causing the thought of them to take form. 
To understand this, we must bear in mind the 
Three Principles in God, Ku or the Divine Es- 
sence or more properly Esse, which is the La- 
tency of the Divine Principle, the Motherhood of 
God, Mind or the Intelligence or Fatherhood 
Principle, which acting upon the Ku causes the 
Centrifugal movement or Divine Energy which 
moves outward into manifestation. By thinking- 
manifest, the Thought of God, acting upon the 
Ku engenders movement which causes the en- 
gendering of a nucleus in this Ku substance, 
which becoming Centrifugal moves outward as 
an act of Divine "Will. In this way each and 
every thought of God is ensouled by Ku, and be- 
comes individually active, containing a will force 
of its own, becoming a sort of dynamic Thought 
Form. These in turn organize from the Prin- 
ciples with which they come in contact corre- 
sponding forms, so that as a matter of fact every 
thing in the manifestation is nothing more than 
the body engendered by the active thought of God. 
Thus all the thoughts of God spontaneously man- 
ifest themselves as things, but ever taking their 
individuality from the original thought. There- 
fore, thinking-manifest merely means, the mani- 
festation in form of each and every thought of 
God. This process operates spontaneously, having 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 19 

no element of design involved therein. The mani- 
festation is nothing other than the form assumed 
by the thought of God. As the mind of God is 
very active, there is a perpetual stream of 
thought perpetually coming into manifestation, 
. I and hence the manifestation is forever being re- 
newed by the perpetual stream of Divine 
Thought. God creates nothing, on the contrary, 
His Thought is forever becoming manifest. All 
things are therefore nothing other than the 
Thought of God made manifest. The Universe 
therefore could not possibly be other than' it is, 
seeing that it is the form assumed by the 
Thought of God. It is thus that all Noumena 
come into being. The Monad is nothing other 
than the original form assumed by the Thought 
of God. Because nothing can possibly come into 
being save through the engendering potency of a 
Thought of God, it follows that Will of God, 
that is the Centrifugal Action of the Divine 
Thought, is the cause of all things. Thus is Kis- 
met seen to be perfectly true, and this is the ul- 
timate principle of Fate or Eternal Necessity. 
Thus, by thinking-manifest, God thinks all things 
into manifestation, and there is no other possi- 
ble mode of creation save the thinking into mani- 
festation. This is the true secret of Divine Al- 
chemy, and he who has mastered our meaning 
here has become a master of the Art of Creation. 

2. He, then, alone who is not made, 'tis 
clear, is both beyond all power of thinking- 
manifest, and is unmanif est. 

And as He thinketh all things manifest, He 
manifests through all things and in all, and 
most of all in whatsoever things He wills to 
manifest. 

Do thou, then, Tat, my son, pray first unto 
our Lord and Father, the One-and-Only One, 



20 PHILOSOPHIA EERMETICA 



from whom the One doth come, to show His 
mercy unto thee, in order that thou rnayest 
have the power to catch a thought of this so 
mighty God, one single beam of Him to shine 
into thy thinking. For thought alone "sees" 
the Unmanif est, in that it is itself unmanif est. 

If, then, thou hast the power, He will, Tat, 
manifest to thy mind's eyes. The Lord be- 
grudgeth not Himself to anything, but mani- 
fests Himself through the whole world. 

Thou hast the power of taking thought, of 
and gazing face to face upon God's Image. 
But if what is within thee even is unmanif est 
to thee, how, then, shall He Himself who is 
within thy self be manifest for thee by means 
of [outer] eyes? 

He, then, alone who is not made, 'tis clear, 
is both beyond all power of thinking-manifest, 
and is unmanif est. 

The meaning of this is that the One-and-only 
One is not made at any time, but forever is, 
abides forever beyond all power of thinking Him- 
self into manifestation. While the thought which 
thinks into manifestation emanates from His 
mind, yet, when it comes into manifestation, it 
takes on the condition of the manifestation, and 
hence ceases to be what it was while it abode in 
the Mind, therefore He Himself can never be 
thought into manifestation, though all manifes- 
tations are thought out of that Mind. Hence, 
that Mind can never be manifested, though all 
manifestations come forth from It. And like- 
wise, Ku can never be manifested, though all 
manifestations come from It, yet when the mani- 
festation takes place, it ceases to be Ku, there- 
fore is Ku not manifested. Neither is the Mind 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 21 

of Ku manifested, though all manifestations are 
originated by the Mind and born of Ku, thus is 
not God made Manifest, though He manifests all 
things. 

And as He thinketh all things manifest, He 
manifests through all things and in all, and 
most of all in whatsoever things He wills to 
manifest. 

In as much as God thinks all things into mani- 
festation, He manifests through all things and 
in all. While the true nature of God is not made 
manifest in any thing, yet His fiat or image is 
reflected or mirrored in whatever He has thought 
into manifestation. Though God Himself is in 
nothing, yet His image is in every thing, and 
through every thing can we see his picture, thus 
affording a means by which we can reach an ap- 
prehension of God through the Analogy of Na- 
ture. However, His image is much clearer in 
those things which are the immediate manifesta- 
tions of His will, that is the purest forms of the 
Intelligent Kosmos, the true and perfect Image 
of God. It is here that we are able to see the 
clearest reflection of God Himself. They being 
in the nature of the First and the Direct Ema- 
nation. 

Do thou, then, Tat, my son, pray first unto 
our Lord and Father, the One-and-Only One, 
from whom the One doth come, to show His 
mercy unto thee, in order that thou mayest 
have the power to catch a thought of this so 
mighty God, one single beam of Him to shine 
into thy thinking. For thought alone "sees" 
the Unmanifest, in that it is itself unmanif est. 

The One-and-Only One is the Unmanifest God, 
Ku, Mind and Will, the thinker into manifest a- 



22 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

tion. The One is the Manifestation, the purest 
aspect of the Image of God, which comes into 
being by being thought into manifestation 
through the spontaneous action of the Mind of 
God. The all important thing is that we should 
be able to catch a thought of that so mighty God, 
that is that we may catch within our own mind, 
one of His Thoughts, not that we may think of 
Him with our own mind, but that a Thought of 
His Mind may enter our own mind and enlighten 
it. This knowledge comes not through our own 
thinking, but through the action of His thought 
upon our own thinking and thus directing it 
along the upward way. Thought is unmanifest 
to the senses, and therefore it is able to unite 
with the thought of the Unmanifest and in that 
way bring into our mind a consciousness of the 
nature of the Unmanifest. Man can therefore 
see the Unmanifest God only in his thought; 
those claiming to have seen God in any other 
way, save as a mental concept, are liars if by 
God they mean the Unmanifest. He can be seen 
only through the Intelligence, and then only 
when the Divine Thought has penetrated the 
thought of the man, so that his thought is ele- 
vated to the Plane of the Unmanifest God and 
His Thought. This condition of exaltation is 
what we should seek above all other gifts. 

If, then, thou hast the power, He will, Tat, 
manifest to thy mind's eyes. The Lord be- 
grudgeth not Himself to anything, but mani- 
fests Himself through the whole world. 

God does not shut Himself off from anyone or 
anything, but on the contrary, He manifests 
Himself through the whole world, there being 
nothing that is not a manifestation of Him. We 
having the power through the spiritualization of 
our thought, to permit the Divine Thought to 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 23 

unite itself with our thought, in such a manner 
as to permit God to manifest Himself to the 
mind's eyes, or for the perceptive power of our 
mind to attain an Apprehension of God the One- 
and-Only One. It is not His Unwillingness to be 
seen that keeps us from seeing Him, but the con- 
dition of our thought which prevents Him from 
manifesting Himself in our Mind. Thus the 
Perfect man must see God, it is the imperfection 
of the average man that prevents him from see- 
ing the Unmanif est. 



Thou hast the power of taking thought, of 
-seeing it and grasping it in thy own "hands," 
and gazing face to face upon God's Image. 
But if what is in thee even is unmanifest to 
thee, how, then, shall He Himself who is with- 
in thy self be manifest for thee by means of 
[outer] eyes? 

The mind of man is so constituted that it is 
quite capable of manipulating pure thought with 
the same facility that it does the impressions de- 
rived from objects through the senses. Before 
any one can attack the problem of the Unmani- 
fest, he must have mastered this art of Abstract 
Thinking, so that the most abstract thoughts can 
be visualized, and made real to him, so that he 
can handle them as though they were familiar 
objects. When he has reached this state of ab- 
straction where the purest thoughts and ideas 
are perfectly real to him, where they are actual- 
ly things in his consciousness and can be clas- 
sified as things, one is able through this process 
of abstract reasoning to see God's Image, the 
Intelligible Kosmos, face to face, to attain First- 
Hand Knowledge relative to it. In this way, our 
understanding of the Intelligible Kosmos will be 
equally as definite as our grasp of the Sensible 



24 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

Kosmos. But while all this is possible to the 
master of his own mind, if one has not yet 
reached the point where he is conscious of the ul- 
timate workings of his own mind, if he cannot 
"see" the processes going on within himself, 
how can he, depending solely upon his outer 
senses for guidance, be able to grasp the work- 
ings of the Divine Mind, which is back of, and 
much more subtle and elusive than the thought 
of the human mind? It follows therefore, that 
no one can have this comprehension of God or 
even of the Image of God until he has mastered 
the difficult Art of Mental Introspection. The 
mind must be taught to react upon itself, and to 
indulge in self-analysis, until it has reached the 
utmost depths of its own possibilities, and when 
it has mastered all of its own mazes, will it be 
able to use its powers of abstraction to gaze forth 
upon God's Image, the Intelligible Kosmos. The 
difficulty then of inspecting this Image of God 
is not in the lack of the faculty, but in the fact 
that very few people know how to look at it. It 
is because of the fact that there are very few 
trained minds in the world. What is taken as 
training of the mind, relates to Concrete 
Thought, which is of no use in this field of re- 
search, and not to the capacity for Abstract 
thought which is all important. In other words, 
we are taught to observe things, but not Ideas 
which are the realities back of all things. Con- 
trary to the common opinion, this power of In- 
trospection, and mental Abstraction can be 
taught to any one with ordinary Intelligence, and 
with proper training it can be learned quite easily 
in a comparatively short time. The difficulty is 
that in the first place, there is but little import- 
ance attached to this department of research, and 
then again there are very few who know how to 
train a mind. But doubtless the principal diffi- 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 25 

culty is in the total ignorance of every one as to 
the existence of this great field of Abstract Idea- 
tion, within the mind of man. 



LESSON II 
The Manifestation of God. 

3. But if thou wouldst "see" Him, bethink 
thee of the sun, bethink thee of moon's course, 
bethink thee of the order of the stars. Who 
is the One who watcheth o'er that order? For 
every order hath its boundaries marked out 
by place and number. 

The sun's the greatest god of gods in 
heaven; to whom all the heavenly gods give 
place, as unto king and master. And He, this 
so-great one, he greater than the earth and 
sea, endures to have above him circling small- 
er stars than him. Out of respect to Whom, 
or out of fear of Whom, my son [doth he do 
this] ? 

Nor like nor equal is the course each of 
these stars describes in heaven. Who then is 
He who marketh out the manner of their 
course and its extent? 

But if thou wouldst "see" Him, bethink thee 
of the sun, bethink thee of moon's course, 
bethink thee of the order of the stars. Who 
is the One who watcheth o'er that order? For 
every order hath its boundaries marked out 
by place and number. 

For the one who has not as yet reached that 
supreme height of mentality, where God's Image 
can be directly seen, but who must reason out 
the problem, and in that way attain an Intuition 
of God, the order of nature presents an ideal field 
of investigation. One is advised to consider the 

27 



28 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

course and circuit of the sun, with its relation to 
the heavens in general and to our solar system in 
particular. Let him also think of the course of 
the moon, and of the order of the stars, in other 
words, let him consider the science of Astronomy. 
If he makes the proper study of the heavens he 
will see that it is all arranged Mathematically, 
and that every body in the heavens has itself con- 
fined to some definite locality, though every one 
of them moves in its course, it can never deviate 
from that course, its boundaries are limited by 
a force that it can never overcome. As the uni- 
verse is ruled by numbers, it follows that all num- 
bers are in reality rhythmic groupings of forces, 
that are governed by strict mathematical law. The 
study of Astronomy therefore, clearly demon- 
strates that the heavenly bodies are not indi- 
vidually self- sufficient, but that they are each and 
all governed by some rhythmical arrangement of 
force, by a symphony of force in fact, and that 
that symphony of force is something exterior and 
also anterior to the heavenly bodies themselves. 
This harmony of force existed before there were 
any heavenly bodies in existence, otherwise it 
could not have obtained such perfect control of 
them. There would have been some discrepancy 
in the arrangement somewhere, if it had obtained 
control after they were created. It was that very 
harmony of force that engendered the heavenly 
bodies, and therefore, this arrangement could 
never have been fortuitous in its origin. Also, 
Mechanical Uniformitarianism cannot be true, 
for the simple reason that these movements are 
not uniform, it is a system of unity in diversity 
and diversity in unity that is presented to our un- 
derstanding. Everywhere we see perfect order, 
and as this order is intelligent, that is, it is just 
such an order as a perfect intelligence would have 
produced, which indicates that the force produc- 
ing this order operates intelligently, hence it is 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 29 



the effect of an active intelligence. What then is 
that guiding intelligence I 

The sun's the greatest god of gods in 
heaven, to whom all the heavenly gods give 
place as unto king and master. And he, this 
so-great one, he greater than the earth and 
sea, endures to have above him circling small- 
er stars than he. Out of respect to Whom, 
or out of fear of Whom, my son [doth he do 
this] ? 

In this paragraph, we have the argument of 
the preceding one elaborated still further. The 
gods here spoken of are the heavenly bodies. 
Called gods, for the reason that Hermes was 
wiser than the later philosophers, in that he knew 
that all the heavenly bodies were living beings, 
self-conscious, having each a will of its own, each 
endowed with its own intelligence. He knew that 
they were not mechanical in their nature, but al- 
together different. This argument is in reality 
an anticipation of the Newtonian Theory of Uni- 
versal Gravitation, and a refutation of that ab- 
surd theory, for it shows that in accordance with 
the Newtonian Theory, the sun would be greater 
in its gravitative force than all the rest of the 
Universe combined for the reason that the great 
distance of the stars would so minimize their 
gravitative force that the sun would exercise 
such a gravitative force on the solar system as 
to make it independent of all the rest of the uni- 
verse. The question then is, why does not the 
Theory of Universal Gravitation make good in 
this instance! What is it that prevents the sun 
from doing exactly what it would do if Univer- 
sal Gravitation were true? There is then some 
other force that is superior to Gravitation, and 
that dispenses with the workings of Gravitation, 



30 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

whenever it suits that force to do so, which would 
mean that Gravitation is merely an effect pro- 
duced by some great cause, that ever keeps it 
under control. Hence Gravitation is not the ab- 
solute power that science has assumed it to be, 
but is in fact an effect produced by some other 
cause, and it must be an intelligent cause to be 
able to realize such perfect results at all times. 
The question is what is the nature of that cause? 

Nor like nor equal is the course each of 
these stars describes in heaven. Who then is 
He who marketh out the manner of their 
course and its extent? 

Here we have our attention called to the great 
dissimilarity between the courses of all of the 
diverse stars, and yet we are reminded of the 
fact that each follows its own course, and yet, 
while each is absolutely individual in its move- 
ments, there is harmony preserved among all 
these movements. In this way is our attention 
again called to the utter fallacy of the Theory of 
Universal Gravitation as an explanation of 
Physical and Mathematical Astronomy. If every 
body in the heavens acted upon every other body, 
the result would be an averaging up of all the 
Grayitative forces, so that a uniformity of move- 
ment would be the result, but the facts are that 
in all the heavens there are not two bodies the 
course of which is either equal or similar. This 
means that the force which directs them in their 
movements, must act upon each star individual- 
ly and entirely independently of its action upon 
every other body in the heavens. This of course 
will mean that that force is directed in all of its 
operations by a discriminating intelligence, to 
which it responds at all times. It will also indi- 
cate that this Intelligence is Imminent in all the 
operations of this force. The question then is, 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 31 

what is the nature of this force and of this guid- 
ing Intelligence! What is it that controls the 
universe? What is the Mind and Will back of, 
and expressing itself through every movement of 
the Universe? The argument from design is 
frightfully weak in comparison with this. We see 
here the clear demonstration of the perpetual 
operation of an immanent, intelligent, conscious, 
directing Will, expressing in action a very com- 
plicated, synthetic mentality, to which every por- 
tion of the universe, is individually and inces- 
santly responsive, and to which in spite of this 
individuality of its operations, the Universe as 
a whole, is at all times synthetically responsive. 
In other words, there is the perpetual activity 
of an intelligence capable at all times of guiding 
the universe as a whole and at the same time in 
each of its constituent parts, without ever a hitch 
occuring in its operations. Where can one look 
for such an Intelligence? It is undoubtedly not 
in the Material World, for it rules every portion 
of the material world, and the whole of it as well, 
hence it must be something of an Immaterial na- 
ture. Would not such an Intelligence and Will 
be quite Divine? and would it not in fact be the 
Manifest God? In this way does he prove the 
existence of the Manifest God without asserting 
it. He merely shows that without such a princi- 
ple, the Universe could not possibly be as it is, 
and thus there is left the mysterious X as its 
guiding principle. 

4. The Bear up there that turneth round 
himself, and carries round the whole cosmos 
with it— Who is the owner of this instru- 
ment? Who He who hath set round the sea 
its bounds? Who He who hath set on its seat 
the earth? 

For, Tat, there is someone who is the Maker 



32 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

and the Lord of all these things. It could not 
be that number, place and measure could be 
kept without some one to measure them. No 
order whatsoever could be made by that which 
lacketh place and lacketh measure ; nay, even 
this is not without a Lord, my son. For if 
the orderless lacks something, in that it is not 
lord of order's path, it also is beneath a lord 
— the one who hath not yet ordained it order. 

The Bear up there that turneth round itself, 
and carries round the whole cosmos with it — 
Who is the owner of this instrument? Who 
He who hath set round the sea its bounds? 
Who He who hath set on its seat the earth ? 

The prevalent Astronomical Theory is that each 
of the stars revolves around some other star, 
which draws it through gravitation, but this is 
not true of the Constellation of the Great Bear 
for instance. It turns round itself, that is, it 
revolves around its own center of gravity. Now 
there is no theory of Gravitation that will account 
for this. If we assume that the gravitative force 
of the other stars controls this, we have to at- 
tribute to them an alterative gravitation, for 
if their gravitative force was continuous they 
would hold the Bear perfectly stationary; but 
if their force of Gravity is alterative, then it is 
not the Gravitation of Science, but merely a 
gravitative effect, produced by some anterior 
cause, which is something altogether different. 
The fact of the matter is that the Constellation of 
the Bear moves by reason of its own force, and 
that its path has a certain measure of curvature, 
that causes it to follow the path that it does, 
owing to no force from without, but from the ec- 
centricity of its own will to move. So far from 
being the one controlled by Gravity, it is the body 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 33 

that exercises the effect of Gravity upon all the 
rest of the kosmos, that is that portion of the 
Universe over which it exercises control, which 
is for us the whole kosmos. As the Bear is sub- 
ject to nothing in the heavens, what is the force 
that governs it, and that abiding in it, gives to all 
of its stars that common will to move in that spe- 
cific direction! It is without doubt a spiritual 
force that is immanent in the Bear and gives di- 
rection and purpose to all of its movements, what 
is its nature? Also the question is introduced 
as to the force that holds the sea and the earth in 
position. We are all familiar with the usual ans- 
wers that are given to these questions, but they 
do not go back far enough. We have already 
shown that Gravitation is merely an effect pro- 
duced by the workings of an intelligent cause, 
and hence we must find what principle it is that 
is back of Gravitation. What is the Law of 
Gravitation! That is the question to be settled. 

For, Tat, there is someone who is the Maker 
and the Lord of all these things. It could not 
be that number, place and measure could be 
kept without someone to make them. No 
order whatsoever could be made by that which 
lacketh place and lacketh measure ; nay, even 
this is not without a lord, my son. For if the 
orderless lacks something, in that it is not 
lord of order's path, it also is beneath a lord 
— the one who hath not yet ordained it order. 

All those things indicated above, have come 
into being at some point in time. While it is true 
that Matter, or Hyle is eternal, it is matter in 
its diffused or inorganic state. Organic Matter 
is not eternal, but has been organized at some 
point in time. The forces growing out of the 
organized state of a material object, are not sufiici- 



34 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

ent to keep it going after its organization but they 
could not possibly organize the form, as they are 
the result of its organic operation. In other 
words, no body has ever been able to organize 
itself. As all organisms have been organized at 
some point in time it follows that previous to 
that time they did not exist. This being true, it 
follows that that which has organized an organ- 
ism, was something anterior to that organism, 
something different to the organism and 
something in its very nature inorganic. As 
all those things have come into being in time, 
they were made by something, and being made in 
a certain way, their making embodied certain 
forces that would continue to govern them, and 
therefore, they continue to be ruled by that which 
was placed in them by that which made them, 
therefore, that which made the organism at the 
time that it first came into being, forever con- 
tinues to rule it. Therefore, all material things 
have had their maker and they still have their 
Lord. Number, place and measure, the three in- 
gredients of all formation and action, are the 
products of something anterior to them. Measure 
is the course of a line of force, or a current of 
vibration, and it is impossible for a line of force 
to move anywhere without some anterior princi- 
ple to cause the line of force to move in the direc- 
tion that it does. Measure is therefore the ef- 
fect of an anterior cause. Place is the field in 
which vibration moves, and it exists not until vi- 
bration begins there, and hence place is the ef- 
fect of an anterior cause sending vibration into 
that field. Number is the rhythm in vibration 
caused by Intelligence, and hence number cannot 
exist except as the effect of an anterior intelli- 
gent causative principle producing it. Therefore, 
number, place and measure, must not only be 
originated by something, but they must be for- 
ever kept as they are by something apart from 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 35 

themselves. No order of any kind whatsoever 
can ever come into being, without a place for it 
to occupy, and without the measure of its opera- 
tions: hence, the creation of place and measure 
of the order are conditions precedent to the pro- 
duction of the order, whatever it may be. There- 
fore, a creative intelligence is a condition prece- 
dent to the coming into being of all things cre- 
ated. The orderless condition, is not to be taken 
as a merely negative state, on the contrary, it is 
just as positive as order itself. The lack of or- 
der, is the result of a force and an intelligent 
principle that prevents the manifestation of or- 
der. There being an ordering or synthesizing in- 
telligence in nature, it follows that this would 
bring order into all things were it not for the 
operation of an intelligence that was maintaining 
a state of disorder or chaos. This chaos engen- 
dering intelligence is therefore the cause of the 
lack of order wherever it may be found. Hence 
it becomes evident that this guiding intelligence 
that causes the introduction of order into the 
kosmos, is a discriminative intelligence which 
sometimes directs that order shall be introduced 
and at other times directs that disorder shall con- 
tinue. This makes the intelligent principle of the 
Universe more complicated than ever, and indi- 
cates the great importance of this mind, which is 
in reality the Manifest God ; in this way does na- 
ture reveal the Manifest God to man. 






LESSON III 
The Manifest God. 

5. Would it were possible for thee to get 
thee wings, and soar into the air, and, poised 
midway 'tween earth and heaven, behold the 
earth's solidity, the sea's fluidity (the flowing 
of its streams), the spaciousness of air, fire's 
swiftness, [and] the coursing of the stars, the 
swiftness of heaven's circuit round them 
[all] ! 

Most blessed sight were it, my son, to see 
all these beneath one sway — the motionless in 
motion, and the unmanifest made manifest; 
whereby is made this order of the cosmos and 
the cosmos which we see of order. 

Would it were possible for thee to get thee 
wings, and soar into the air, and, poised mid- 
way 'tween earth and heaven, behold the 
earth's solidity, the sea's fluidity (the flowing 
of its streams), the spaciousness of air, fire's 
swiftness, [and] the coursing of the stars, the 
swiftness of heaven's circuit round them 
[all] ! 

Were man removed from the environment of 
the earth, so that he could see the kosmos not 
from the point of view of the earth, but from that 
of an outside observer, who was in no sense in- 
fluenced by the earthly conditions, he would be 
able to see in all the manifestations of kosmic 
and mundane life the Manifest God. Why is the 
earth solid? We know that all matter is mo- 

37 



38 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

lecular, and hence, any solid body is solid merely 
because of the fact that its molecules are held 
together in close affinity. Why is this the case? 
Why are the molecules composing the earth held 
in contact instead of being diffused? The common 
answer is that it is Gravitation that holds them 
thus. This, however, is merely evading the issue. 
What is Gravitation? We are told that it is the 
tendency for one body to attract another to it. 
In other words, as used in this case, Gravitation 
is the tendency of molecules to come into contact, 
and hence, to say that it is Gravitation that draws 
the molecules of the earth together so as to con- 
stitute its solidity, is equivalent to saying that 
the molecules are drawn into close affinity, be- 
cause they come into close affinity! Gravitation 
is supposed to be that force which causes all 
bodies to attract other bodies in proportion to 
their mass and decreasing this gravitative in- 
fluence with the square of the distance. But it is 
to be borne in mind that this earth was produced 
at some point in time, and hence there was a time 
when there was no solid earth, hence, when all 
of its present molecules were in a state of diffu- 
sion. At some point in time, these diffused mole- 
cules came together and in this way created the 
solid earth. The force that caused them to be 
drawn together, was of necessity a force operat- 
ing on the several molecules individually, and 
one operating anterior to the concentration of 
those molecules into the solid earth, seeing that 
it was this force which concentrated them into 
the solid earth. This force was therefore, not 
gravitation, as the term is understood by Science. 
Now, if a force other than the gravitation of 
science was capable of originating the solidity of 
the earth, why is it not capable of maintaining 
that solidity for an indefinite period of time — 
to-wit, so long as that solidity shall continue? 
If this is true, then no other force is needed 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 39 

for the purpose of maintaining that solid- 
ity, hence gravitation has nothing to do 
with the problem. In fact, there is no 
such thing as a Force of Gravitation or a Law 
of Gravitation. Gravitation is merely a phenome- 
non produced by this force of molecular attrac- 
tion that we have to consider as the solidifying 
force of the earth. The force that causes the 
molecules to move in such a way as to form the 
solidity of the earth, can be nothing other than 
the force of molecular vibration, and it must be 
a Centripetal Force operating among those mole- 
cules, and a force acting upon each one of them 
separately and yet producing a unity of action 
on the part of them all. This can only be true in 
the case of a polarity of vibration in the case 
of the several molecules. Hence we must have a 
duality of force, acting in such a manner as to 
polarize the vibration of the several molecules to 
the end that they assume a Centripetal motion 
among themselves. Thus it is evident that this 
is the true cause of the solidity of the earth. Then 
the question at once comes into mind, what is the 
origin of such a force? It is of necessity a force, 
in no sense arising from organized matter, and 
in fact its origin is not in the molecules them- 
selves, but as it directs the movements of the 
molecules it must be a force anterior to the exis- 
tence of the molecules. It can only cause the 
molecules to vibrate in the way that they do by 
acting directly on their Atoms, hence it cannot be 
an atomic force, but must be something existing 
anterior to the existence of the Atom. Its polar- 
ity indicates that it is both Electrical and Mag- 
netic and hence the force itself must act through 
the instrumentality of Electrons, which indicates 
that as a force it was in existence anterior to the 
existence of the Electron. Its vibration must act 
upon the Ion in order to make it vibrate, and 
hence it must act anterior to the existence of the 



40 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

Ion. It must therefore be an Active Force in the 
Astral Light, and this means that as a force it 
must exist anterior to the existence of the Astral 
Light; hence it must be a Manasic Force, and 
hence in a sense intelligent. In this way are we 
able to see this force which constitutes the solidity 
of the earth, as an expression of the Manifest 
God. 

Again, what constitutes the fluidity of the sea? 
We know that the union of two atoms of Hydro- 
gen with one atom of Oxygen forms a molecule 
of water. Why do Hydrogen and Oxygen unite 
in those proportions. Obviously it is due to the 
principle of polarity working in the two elements. 
But why in that exact proportion? Undoubtedly 
because of a modification in the polarity of the 
elements. Why do salt and certain other ele- 
ments join the water? Because of another modi- 
fication in the principle of polarity operating in 
this combination. Why is it that the molecules 
of water do not cohere with the same degree of 
force that the molecules of the earth do? Because 
the degree of affinity is not so close among them 
as it is among the molecules of earth. This will 
give us what appears to be the cause of the flu- 
idity of the seas; but why is it that all this is 
true of the water? The origin of the vibratory 
forces constructing the water can be seen to be 
quite similar to that of the vibratory forces con- 
structing the earth, but why is there this differ- 
ence ? It is clearly due to the fact that in the As- 
tral Light there is both an earthy and watery 
principle, that is reflected in earth and water of 
the physical world. There is no cause for this 
differentiation to be found in the Astral Light, 
we simply see that there is an earthy and a wa- 
tery Astral Light, and therefore the cause of 
the differentiation is to be sought anterior to the 
existence of the Astral Light. There is not even 
the process of differentiation there, we simply 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 41 

have Astral Earth and Astral Water. Therefore 
the cause of this must be sought anterior to the 
existence of the Astral Plane of nature. There 
must then be a differentiating principle some- 
where, in which there abides and out of which 
there comes forth, a Moist Nature. This is of 
course the Manifest God, and so the study of the 
fluidity of the sea gives to us a clear demonstra- 
tion of the existence of the Manifest God. 

Let us now look at the spaciousness of the air. 
What is it that gives to air its space filling power? 
Air is not solid, neither is it in the form of drops, 
the unit of construction in the airy space is the 
air globule. However, air may form drops and 
thus become a liquid by cooling it, and when the 
temperature is lowered still farther it will be- 
come a solid. As heat is a mode of motion, it 
follows that air becomes a liquid by the lowering 
of its vibration, and when the vibration is re- 
duced still farther it will become a solid. The 
spaciousness of air is therefore due to its rate 
of vibration. The constitution of air is due to 
presence of an overabundance of Nitrogen in its 
composition. But why is it that it has this par- 
ticular nature? We can trace its vibration back 
the same as we have the other elements, and we 
find that it is the result and the manifestation of 
an Airy Principle in the Astral Light. Air does 
not originate in the Astral Light; it simply con- 
tains Air in common with Earth and Water, and 
hence the origin of the air is to be sought in the 
Dry Nature anterior to the existence of the As- 
tral Light. This is not even to be sought in the 
Manas, for the simple reason that this Airy Prin- 
ciple is closely present in the Manas, in the very 
existence of the Manas, hence it must originate in 
Hyle. There is then but one place for the 
Dry Nature and hence the Air to originate, and 
that is in the Manifest God, hence the spacious- 
ness of the air, and in fact its every attribute goes 



42 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

to prove beyond a doubt the existence of the 
Manifest God as the cause of Air as well as of 
Water and Earth. Thus we see still another 
proof of the Manifest God. 

Think again of the swiftness of the fire. How 
does it obtain its capacity for swiftness of move- 
ment? Obviously this can only be because of the 
intense vibration of the atoms going to compose 
it! Its heat is also the result of its intense vibra- 
tion; but whence came that intensity of vibra- 
tion! It is evident that it is because of the fact 
that its atoms are bound together in a yet looser 
degree of affinity, and that it has not even a glo- 
bule as its unit. In this way is it able to vibrate 
much more rapidly than any of the other ele- 
ments. And yet if we trace it back through all 
the Planes of Nature we find that on all of them 
Fire exists as Fire and as nothing else. We find 
that it permeats all the other elements. There is 
fire imprisoned in all solid matter, in every drop 
of water and in every globule of air, but fire is 
also free in nature. We can trace it back into 
Hyle as the Hot Nature that is one of the very 
first manifestations of the Creative Principle. It 
is a Primeval Element. This simply brings us to 
the point where we are forced to admit that it 
comes from the Manifesting God, as it has no 
origin external to Him. In fact it is evident that 
these four natures, the Hot, the Cold, the Wet 
and the Dry, exist in the very being of the Mani- 
fest God, and that they are merely externalized 
in such a way as to become Fire and Water, 
Earth and Air, which in turn becomes the con- 
stituents of the Universe. This shows that the 
Manifest God is in reality the Anama Mundi, or 
Soul of the World, that the kosmos is merely the 
Siderial Body of the Manifest God who is its 
soul. Thus it is indeed true that the whole kos- 
mos is nothing other than a Hylic Animal. 

The coursing of the stars, and the swiftness 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 43 

of heaven's circuit round them will clearly prove 
the operation of the Manifest God, also if we 
could see things as they are, rather than as they 
seem, for then would we see that their motive 
force was not generated within the heavens, but 
existed in full force anterior to the existence of 
the heavens, and that it was this force that or- 
ganized the heavens, and that continues to direct 
their movements. This force is of a higher na- 
ture than that of the heavens, and therefore, it 
is the Manifest God Himself. 

Most blessed sight were it, my son, to see all 
these beneath one sway — the motionless in 
motion, and the unmanifest made manifest; 
whereby is made this order of the cosmos and 
the cosmos which we see of order. 

Were one able to see things as they are he 
would discover that the entire universe is but one 
system of perfect harmony. That it is all gov- 
erned by one principle, giving perfect unity 
ever present in motion. This is of course a rela- 
tive statement. In the last analysis there is noth- 
ing motionless, though there are expanses that 
do not move as such, though movement is ever 
transpiring within them. The Unmanifest is 
ever coming into manifestation. It is through 
the perpetual manifestation of the Unmanifest 
that this order of the kosmos is maintained. Not 
only is there an order of the kosmos, however, 
but the order which is preserved among all the 
diverse parts of this diverse system, presents in 
itself a perfect kosmos, that is, a reflection, or 
image of the Unmanifest God. 

6. If thou wouldst see Him too through 
things which suffer death, both on the earth 
and in the deep, think of a man being fash- 



44 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

ioned in the womb, my son, and strictly scru- 
tinize the art of Him who fashions him, and 
learn who fashions this fair and godly image 
of the Man. 

Who [then] is He who traceth out the cir- 
cles of the eyes; who He who boreth out the 
nostrils and the ears; who He who openeth 
[the portal of] the mouth ; who He who doth 
stretch out and tie the nerves; who He who 
channels out the veins; who He who hard- 
eneth the bones; who He who covereth the 
flesh with skin; who He who separates the 
fingers and the joints; who He who widens 
out a treading for the feet; who He who 
diggeth out the ducts ; who He who spreadeth 
out the spleen; who He who shapeth heart 
like to a pyramid; who He who setteth ribs 
together; who He who wideneth the liver 
out; who He who maketh lungs like to a 
sponge ; who He who maketh belly stretch 
so much; who He who doth make prominent 
the parts most honorable, so that they may be 
seen, while hiding out of sight those of least 
honor? 

God is also to be seen in the things that- suffer 
death, that is all those things that are in oppo- 
sition to the immortal world-order. It makes no 
difference whether they be beings of an Earthy or 
a watery nature. The most perfect illustration 
of this can be found, owing to the extremely com- 
plicated nature of his construction, in the fash- 
ioning of the human foetus in the womb. In the 
fashioning of this fair and godly image of the 
Man, we have the most intricate of all the work- 
ings of the art of God. The Man here is the 
Archetypal Divine, or Heavenly Man- Woman, 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 45 

of which each human man or woman is an image. 
This being the case, it follows that the purpose 
of the human structure is to permit of the ex- 
pression of all the attributes of the Man- Woman. 
They must each and all function in and through 
the individual man, hence every separate part of 
him must be in the nature of an organ adapted 
to the functioning of some Function of that Man. 
This being the case, the Archetypal Man must be 
the pattern that is followed in all the man build- 
ing. Undoubtedly there will be differentiations 
due to the work of the human parents, and par- 
ticularly that of the mother, but even such work 
must conform to the common type. This means 
that the Man is active in the building of every 
human structure, so that it may conform in all 
essential features to the pattern of the Heavenly 
Man. The parents are therefore not the only or 
even the most important factors in the construc- 
tion of the organism, they can only build in ac- 
cordance with the diagram shown to them, their 
work must in every feature conform to that. Of 
course there are instances in which this guidance 
is interfered with, and then, we have a sub-nor- 
mal infant, and all cases in which the direction 
of the Man is interfered with result in these sub- 
normal children. A true human child can only be 
constructed by following to the letter the direc- 
tion of the Man. 

The construction of the body is in reality a 
process of building. First of all, the foetus has 
no definite form. It is merely the plastic mate- 
rial from which the future human organism is 
to be constructed. The entire process is one of 
gradual transformation. Each separate step is 
a distinct work of construction. This being the 
case, it follows that each such work is performed 
by the activity of a distinct force, that works in 
that particular direction and in no other way. In 
other words, the eyes are developed by the work 



46 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

of a particular force, that builds them and nothing 
else. Their growth from the germ, or nucleus 
that is first started by this force, until they have 
become perfect eyes, is the result of that force 
in the Archetypal Man that corresponds to sight 
in the human species. As this function has con- 
structed the organ of the eye, it follows that it 
has constructed it as an organ through which 
it may continue to function throughout life. The 
same is true of the development of the nostrils 
and ears. They are developed through the func- 
tioning of the faculty of Odor and that of sound 
in the Archetypal Man, which develops them as 
the organs through which it is to function 
throughout life. The development of the mouth 
is also the work of that force in the Man which 
is ever to function through it as its organ. The 
nerves are not spontaneously developed, but on 
the contrary, it is a very slow process. A process 
purely vegetative in its nature. In other words 
it is the action upon the foetus of the vibration 
of the Man that is building them as the organs 
through which it may continue to function as the 
nerve force in the human organism. The forma- 
tion of the veins, arteries and capillaries is an- 
other gradual development which is accomplished 
by the action of the Watery Principle in the Man 
that it may use them as the organs through which 
it functions, having its seat of functioning in the 
blood of the man. The gradual transformation 
which develops the bones is the work of the 
Earthy Principle in the Heavenly Man that de- 
velops them so as to use them as organs for its 
activity. We do not realize the great importance 
of the bones. They are the organs of the Earthy 
Principle in the Heavenly Man, or rather of its 
human correspondence. The flesh is covered with 
skin, not so much for the protection of the flesh, 
as for the providing of an organ for the expres- 
sion of that attribute of the Heavenly Man which 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 47 

corresponds to it. The skin is really that through 
which the Centrifugal and the Centripetal Forces 
operate, and which regulates the degree of their 
activities. It was built by this force to be used 
by it in this way. The fingers and the joints were 
developed from the original matter, by the opera- 
tion of those forces corresponding to them. They 
were developed to be the organs for the function- 
ing of those forces, and are ever used as such. 
The feet were constructed by the creative force 
which uses them as its organ of functioning. The 
ducts were also opened by the activity of those 
aspects of the Watery Principle which must ever 
function in and through them as their special or- 
gans. The spleen was also builded by that great 
force that ever functions in it as its organ of 
functioning. Little do the people guess the tran- 
scendent importance of the Heavenly Force, the 
mundane correspondence of which functions in 
the spleen! The heart was constructed by the 
Heavenly Water, in order that its mundane cor- 
respondent might ever function there, using the 
heart as its most important organ. Few save a 
few wise Yogis realize the importance of the 
heart. What does the getting of new Heart sig- 
nify, save and except this, the functioning of the 
Heavenly Water directly through it and not mere- 
ly its mundane correspondence! What else is 
the sprinkling of the Heart with Clean Water? 
The Word is nigh thee, in thine Heart! What 
is the Gluten of Von Eckerthausen but the direct 
entrance of the Heavenly Water into the Heart 
and thence into the blood? What else is the Bap- 
tism of Water, and the being Born of Water? The 
ribs were each constructed by those specific forces 
that were to function in them as their organs of 
functioning. Their principal function is not mere- 
ly to support the vital organs, they serve a far 
more noble purpose. Perhaps now, thou canst 
understand the meaning of the story about God 



48 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

/ taking a rib from the side of Adam to make Eve ? 
The Liver was also constructed by that principle 
which functions in it. The function of the liver 
seems to be the secretion of Bile ; but what is Bile ? 
It is the great Alkaline Principle, and this is one 
of the most important elements in Alchemy. The 
Bile is the physical fluid that acts as the vehicle 
for the manifestation of the Bilious or Alkaline 
Principle of the Heavenly Water. Thus it is that 
the liver is the organ for the manifestation of 
that Alchemy of the Heavenly Water, which can 
alone renew the body and make it young again. 
It is one of the springs of the Fountain of Youth. 
The lungs were constructed by the Airy Princi- 
ple so that it might function there, and that its 
mundane correspondence, the soul of atmosphere, 
might act through them. They serve a far more 
noble purpose than the mere respiration of at- 
mospheric air. The belly was also constructed 
by those forces that function there. The Umbili- 
cus was developed, and the forces that were in- 
tended to function there constituted the Tree of 
Life. Man was separated from the Tree of Life 
simply by a lower force functioning there. When 
that Heavenly Force functions directly through 
this organ, then will he have found the Tree of 
Life once more. The belly is also the seat of 
Sekhet, the Formative Mind. It was that which 
developed it, that it might function there. Well 
does the Chinaman look upon the belly as the seat 
of the Intelligence, and well does the Yogi con- 
centrate on the navel ! Whoso readeth let him un- 
derstand! I reveal to thee the last mystery of 
Divine Alchemy if thou hast the insight to see 
what I write! The entire arrangement of the 
body in all of its parts is the work of the diverse 
forces of the Heavenly Man. They are all simply 
organs through which those forces may function. 
More properly speaking it is not the forces them- 
selves, but their mundane correspondents that 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 49 

function through them. The secret of Divine Al- 
chemy is simply this ; train those organs in such 
a way that gradually their functioning will be ele- 
vated to that point where the powers of the Heav- 
enly Man may directly function through them, so 
that thou wilt be no longer the image of the Man 
but wilt become the Living Vehicle in which he 
directly lives and works through all of his imme- 
diate functions. From this state, let the Manifest 
God directly function through these organs and 
in time let the Unmanifest God enter and func- 
tion through them. It is not enough that He 
should function through thy soul. He must also 
function directly through the organs of thy phys- « 
ical body. What else does it mean to make thy 
body the Temple of the Holy Ghost? Come down 
to the earth, stop thy star-gazing, and realize 
that thy body is the temple of God, that every 
part of it is a vessel of righteousness if thou wilt 
but consecrate it to Him, and thou hast solved 
the last element in the Great Work, this is our 
Sacred Art. Thus do we see the perfect revela- 
tion of the Manifest God. His highest mani- 
festation is man. He dwells within thee. The 
Sacred Chamber of the Temple is Veiled, and 
hence we will not enter there. 



LESSON IV 

The Unmanif est God 

7. Behold how many arts [employed] on 
each material, how many labors on one single 
sketch ; and all exceeding fair, and all in per- 
fect measure, yet all diversified! Who made 
them all? What mother, or what sire, save 
God alone, unmanifest, who hath made all 
things by His Will? 

To get a clear conception of the greatness of 
the works of God, we must avoid the erroneous 
conception that things are spontaneously gen- 
erated, or that they are created by one creative 
effort. The facts in the case are there are hun- 
dreds of separate arts employed on the plastic 
material of the human foetus ere it has come 
to approach with any degree of nearness to the 
Image of the Man. This great number of arts 
is essential owing to the fact of the diversity of 
function that is required in the human individual. 
Each separate force that is to function in the 
new man must create for itself the organ through 
which it is to function, thus in a certain sense 
the creation of those separate organs are in them- 
selves acts of functioning on the part of the forces 
that are later to function through them. The 
Power that is to create must, therefore, differ- 
entiate itself into a number of diverse forces, 
each of which is to act separately in its creative 
operations, and yet the result must be a synthesis 
of organs corresponding to the synthesis of forces 
that has created them. All of these separate arts 
must be brought to bear upon the material in 
order that it may be transformed under this in- 

51 



52 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

fluence in such a way as to provide an instru- 
ment through which all of these forces may find 
perfect freedom of manifestation. Not only is 
it essential that each of these several arts should 
be employed upon the material, however; but it 
is also essential that each of these forces should 
work by stages. There is nothing in the nature 
of an immediate creation here. It is one labor 
after another, until the growth from the original 
vibratory impulse has passed on to the perfect 
consummation in the perfect organ. It is the 
gradual drawing of the outline, and then the fill- 
ing in of the sketch, one line after another, until 
all has been made perfect. Slowly the center is 
built up from the original conception to the per- 
fect realization of the pattern residing in the 
Divine Archetype. All is exceeding fair. Noth- 
ing is out of line. Truly is the construction of 
a human organism a work of art, the art of the 
Divine Artificer. The measurements are per- 
fect. All the lines must be of exactly the correct 
length, so that the forces will have exactly the 
correct play, and no more. There must be no short 
circuiting in this matter. Also there must be no 
open circuits, every circuit must be closed, and 
the current must be exactly so much, and no more. 
Also, there must be no duplicates. Each and 
every part must have its separate work to per- 
form. Not only this, but the body must provide 
organs for the potential forces as well as for those 
active at the time of its construction. It must have 
rudimentary organs capable of later development 
in case of the arousing of forces not yet active in 
man. The future evolution of the soul must be 
provided for, in case it should outstrip the type 
to which it belongs. Seeing that the human organ- 
ism is so perfectly constructed, who is capable of 
such a work as this, save the Unmanifest God 
alone? The intermediate Powers are merely act- 
ing as the channels through which He works, but 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 53 

the real source of those creative powers that do 
this great work, is to be found in the Unmanifest 
God alone. He makes all things that are made, 
through the exercise of the spontaneous creative 
potency of His Will Force. Man is made in the 
image of God in the sense that it is the active 
expression of the attributes of God that engender 
the forces that act upon the matter of the foetus 
in such a way as to evolve it into the complex 
organism that it is. It is those powers expressed 
through form, and all of its functions are but the 
correspondents of those Divine Powers function- 
ing through the diverse parts of the body. We 
are the Will of God expressed in form, and could 
not be other than what we are. This, however, 
does not apply to man alone, but to everything in 
existence. They are all the forms spontaneously 
engendered by the activity of the dynamic Will 
Force of God. The difference in the complexity 
of the structure is merely the means of determin- 
ing the difference in the degree of consciousness 
which it is possible for the organism to manifest. 
Thus we can see the living demonstration of the 
Unmanifest God in all forms of life that we see 
about us. 

8. And no one saith a statue or a picture 
comes to be without a sculptor or without a 
painter; doth then such workmanship as this 
exist without a Worker? What depth of 
blindness, what deep impiety, what depth of 
ignorance! See [then] thou ne'er, son, Tat, 
deprivest works of Worker! 

Nay, rather is He greater than all names, so 
great is He, the Father of them all. For verily 
He is the Only One ; and this His work, to be 
a father. 

The argument here introduced is that of causa- 
tion. Every effect must have a corresponding 



54 PHILOSOPHIA EERMETIGA 

cause. We have shown that all things in the uni- 
verse are works, that there is nothing but what 
has been constructed by an operative force, that 
nothing has come into being of itself, but that all 
things have been constructed. Any work presup- 
poses a worker. A human organism is just as 
much a work of art as is a statue; hence until 
statues come into being independent of sculptures, 
it is illogical to assume that men will come into 
being independent of that which constructs them. 
We have already shown how illogical it is to 
assume that the child is constructed by its parents, 
seeing that all the creative functions work along 
intelligent lines, and that every part of the body 
is perfectly adapted to the functioning of some 
force, and that it would be incomplete without 
each and every part. Now, one of two things 
must be true, either those functions are directed 
by the intelligence of the parents, or else the 
organs of the parents are made use of by a force 
exterior *to them, and hence the directing intelli- 
gence is outside of the parents. It cannot be the 
former, because there is not a man or woman 
upon the earth at the present time who knows the 
functions of all of the diverse parts of the body. 
This being the case, how can the human intelli- 
gence construct an organ adapted to the function- 
ing of some force, the function of which is abso- 
lutely unknown to the man or woman? The intel- 
ligence that directs the construction of a human 
organism is an intelligence superior to that of any 
man or woman who has ever lived, seeing that 
not yet has the human intelligence been able to 
master the mystery of human function. It will 
not do to say that this guiding intelligence is that 
of the soul about to reincarnate, for the simple 
reason that the intelligence of the soul previous 
to reincarnation is the same intelligence that it 
has posterior to such reincarnation. As the soul 
brings its intelligence into reincarnation, it would 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 55 

follow that if it had an intelligence capable of 
directing the formation of snch a body, it would 
know the mystery of perfect human functioning 
and would therefore be the master of the Art of 
Creation while living in the world, and there are 
no such beings, and never have been. If the intelli- 
gence directing the creation of the organism is 
not present in the father, the mother, or the soul 
preparing to reincarnate, it cannot be that this 
construction is wrought other than through the 
sexual organs of the father and mother, acting 
mechanically under the force of some super- 
human energy that is acting through them. All 
of our reasoning indicates that this force is in the 
last analysis, the energy of the Will Force of the 
TJnmanif est God, and hence His is the Intelligence 
guiding it in all of its operations. As this work 
of creation is a divine work, it follows of necessity 
that there must be a Divine Worker to perform 
this work, otherwise there would be an exception 
to the rule that there can never be a work per- 
formed without the operation of a worker adapted 
to the performing of that specific work. We must 
at all times realize that there can be no work 
without its proper Worker, and God, the One and 
Only One, is the worker in the final analysis of 
all works of whatever kind they may be. 

This God is the Father of all names, in that 
they have all come forth from Him. All the 
names have been generated within Ku and born 
from her, and hence God being the Father-Mother 
of all names is greater than them all, on the prin- 
ciple that the cause must ever be greater than the 
sum-total of all its effects. That which brings 
forth is greater than all that is brought forth of 
it. God is the Only One because there is naught 
else save that which has come forth from Him. 
That which has come forth from Him subsisted in 
Him before it came forth, and therefore, is there 
naught apart from Him which is not in Him; 



56 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

therefore, that which was in Him, and came forth, 
is still in Him, hence it is still a part of Him; 
hence there is naught at all but Him ; hence is He 
the Only One. His work is to be a Father, in the 
sense that all of the motions of the Divine Essence 
are motions of creation and generation. In fact, 
the Essence of God is Pure Generation. No single 
Thought of the Mind can possibly fail to generate 
its counterpart, and hence all the Thoughts of the 
Mind are Generative. Other beings generate off- 
spring from time to time, but He is spontane- 
ously, simultaneously and incessantly generative 
throughout Eternity, and throughout the im- 
mensity of His Essence. His essence is that of 
absolute generation. His perpetual generation is 
that which perpetuates the Universe. Therefore, 
Fatherhood is not simply one of His attributes; 
it is His absolute Essence. God is therefore the 
Absolute Father-Mother of all that ever was, that 
is now or that will ever be; from beginnings 
boundless unto an endless end. The time never 
was when He failed to bring forth, and the time 
will never be when He will for an instant cease to 
bring forth. He is the All Father- All Mother 
through time and Eternity. 

9. So, if thou f orcest me somewhat too bold, 
to speak, His being is conceiving of all things 
and making [them]. 

And without its maker it is impossible that 
anything should be, so ever is He not unless 
He ever makes all things, in heaven, in air, in 
earth, in deep, in all of cosmos, in every part 
that is and that is not of everything. For 
there is naught in all the world that is not He. 

He is Himself, both things that are and 
things that are not. The things that are He 
hath made manifest, He keepeth things that 
are not in Himself. 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 57 

So, if thou forcest me somewhat too bold, 
to speak, His being is conceiving of all things 
and making [them]. 

The absolute being of God consists of a dual 
function; in the conceiving of everything, and in 
the making of that which has been conceived. 
This dual function is the result of His dual nature, 
Male-Female. These two natures are in the Mind, 
the masculine principle, which is incessantly en- 
gendering Thoughts, each one of which must con- 
ceive its active expression, and in Ku, the Divine 
Essence, Feminine. Thought acts upon Ku in 
such a way as to impart to Her an Intelligent Im- 
pulse, which is the act of conception, which is the 
only direct effect possible for a Divine Thought. 
Simultaneously with this conception or impulse 
of Ku engendered by the Thought of the Mind, 
the Divine Essence, or Ku responds to this im- 
pulse, and proceeds to make of Her own Essence 
that which corresponds to the Thought which has 
impregnated her with this Mental Germ of Life. 
When the Thought Conceived thing has been made 
in Ku it is expelled through the Centrifugal 
action of the Will Force, and thus being born 
into the Manifestation through the making func- 
tion of Ku the Mother, being, as it were, born out 
of the womb of Ku, it in a certain sense impreg- 
nates the Manifest God, and through the operation 
of Sekhet, the Formative Mind upon Isis, the 
Formative Hyle, it is given its highest form. 
Thus we have three steps in the process — Crea- 
tion, which is the Conception by the thought of 
tlie Mind; Making, which is the gestation and 
birth from Ku, and Formation, which is the mak- 
ing manifest through the formative action of 
Sekhet and Isis. In this way are all things made 
manifest. It is this dual being, as the universal 
Conceiver, masculine, Mind, and the universal 
Maker, feminine, Ku, which in reality constitutes 



58 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

the Unmanifest God. He is nothing apart from 
this. This is He the Eternal Father-Mother. 

And as without its maker it is impossible 
that anything should be, so ever is He not un- 
less He ever makes all things, in heaven, in 
air, in earth, in deep, in all cosmos, in every 
part that is and that is not of everything. For 
there is naught in all the world that is not He. 

The being of God consists absolutely in the 
making of things. Divinity has absolutely no 
other functions. The Esse of the Mind is in the 
act of thinking. Were the Mind to cease to think, 
no matter for how short a period of time, the 
Mind would cease to be, for the Mind is nothing 
other than the perpetual sequence of Thought. 
The being of a Thought consists in its simultane- 
ous contact with Ku, and in the Impulse which 
It gives *to Her. It lives in that impulse, and 
would immediately become extinct were it not for 
that impulse in Ku in which it lives. The Esse 
of Ku is in Her response to the impulse of 
Thought, and in the simultaneous movement to 
make. In other words, Ku subsists in the act of 
making, and should She cease to make for the 
most infinitesimal period of time She would sim- 
ply become extinct. The Unmanifest God is, 
therefore, nothing other than the perpetual 
sequence of conceiving and making. That and 
that alone is the very Esse of the Unmanifest 
God. Everything, no matter on what Plane it may 
be, is in reality made in Ku. Things are made 
there and after being so made are projected or 
born into the Manifestation. Their being made 
manifest is in fact nothing other than their being 
born out of Ku. The manifest God is nothing 
other than the perpetual stream of such things 
being born out of Ku, before they have descended 



PHILOSOPHIA EEBMETICA 59 

into kosmos. The Manifestation is the Zone of 
Formation. When formed in the Manifestation 
they pass out into the kosmos. All that is, and 
that is not, is made in Ku. Both the existent and 
the non-existent She makes in the depths of Her 
Maternal Essence. Hence there is naught in all 
the world that is not the Unmanifest God. The 
Manifest God is nothing other than the manifesta- 
tion of the Unmanifest God, and the kosmos is 
nothing other than the synthesis of the forms 
assumed by this same Divine Ku. Hence the 
world is not. It is the Unmanifest God made 
manifest and visible. He-She is the Energy, the 
Substance and the Form of the Universe and 
apart from God the One-and-Only One there is 
naught. 

He is Himself, both things that are and 
things that are not. The things that are He 
hath made manifest, He keepeth things that 
are not in Himself. 

Things that are not are simply those things 
in the process of making, but which are still con- 
tained within the depths of Ku. While they are 
still in the making, and are subsisting in Ku, they 
are Unmanifest, and are not, in the sense that 
they are as yet a part from Ku, not having as yet 
come forth into being as things rather than as 
Ku. When a thing has been made, when the 
process of its making has been perfected, and it 
has therefore been projected out from Ku, it is 
made manifest in that way. It now is, for it has 
attained being as a thing, and hence it begins its 
existence apart from the pure Esse of Ku. In 
that way does it become manifested. And yet 
those existent and manifested things are still Ku 
in the sense that they are made up of Ku, that 
being the Substance entering into them and noth- 



60 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

ing else besides. They are at all times of the 
nature of Ku, but at the same time they have an 
individuality of their own. This, then, is the 
secret of the manifestation of things. It is the 
mystery of the individualization of Ku. Ku is 
the Universal and the Unity of the Divine Essence. 
When It has become particular, and differentiated, 
it is born forth into manifestation as things. 
These things are therefore the particularity of 
Ku coming forth into individual manifestation as 
things. Thus do we see the Unity of the Unmani- 
fest and of each and all of Its manifestations. 



LESSON V 
The Immanence of God 

10. He is the God beyond all name ; He the 
unmanifest, He the most manifest; He whom 
the mind [alone] can contemplate, He visible 
unto the eyes [as well] ; He is the one of no 
body, the one of many bodies, nay, rather He 
of every body. 

Naught is there which He is not. For all 
are He and He is all. And for this cause hath 
He all names, in that they are one Father's. 
And for this cause hath He Himself no name, 
in that He's Father of [them] all. 

Who, then, may sing Thee praise of Thee, or 
[praise] to Thee? 

Whither, again, am I to turn my eyes to 
sing Thy praise; above, below, within, with- 
out? 

There is no way, no place [is there] about 
Thee, nor any other thing of things that are. 

All [are] in Thee; all are from Thee, 
Thou who givest all and takest naught, for 
Thou hast all and naught is there Thou hast 
not. 

He is the God beyond all name ; He the un- 
manifest, He the most manifest; He whom the 
mind [alone] can contemplate, He visible unto 
the eyes [as well] ; He is the one of no body, 
the one of many bodies, nay, rather He of 
every body. 



62 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

This Unmanifest God is the God beyond all 
name ; for out of Ku have been born all the names, 
of names that are. All the Powers, all the Forces in 
kosmos have been particularized in Ku and have 
been projected from Her Maternal Depths. All the 
names, the Mystic Words, the Words of Power, the 
God Words, each and all have been conceived and 
made in the bosom of Ku, and hence, all names, 
without a single exception, being made there, and 
coming forth from there, no single name is left 
after the total of names have been taken as hav- 
ing come forth; hence no name is left for that 
which hath made all names; therefore, no name 
can be given to the Unmanifest God, seeing that 
He-She is source of all names, both jointly and 
severally; hence is He-She beyond all name. He 
is the unmanifest as we have seen, the one whose 
true Essence is never brought into manifestation, 
and yet is He the most manifest of all things con- 
ceivable, for, every single feature of the mani- 
festation is nothing other than a manifestation of 
that same Essence, which in itself ever remains 
concealed. The true Essence of this God can only 
be contemplated by the mind in the deepest of its 
Abstractions, as He does not present His Essence 
to the senses. He can in His Essence, only be con- 
templated in this way, and yet, in His Manifesta- 
tions, and the forms which they have assumed, 
we can see Him with the eyes; we can inspect 
Him through all the senses; and we can experi- 
ment with His physical expressions. In His pure 
Essence as Mind and Ku, He has no body what- 
soever. In the Manifestation, He has assumed 
many bodies, towit, those of all the Gods and the 
Powers, while in the kosmos He is to be seen in 
each and every body in existence, from the great- 
est to the most infinitesimal. In a word, there is 
nothing at all save God Unmanifest and this same 
God Immanent in all the forms that have em- 
anated from Him or rather Her. It is the Fern- 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 63 

inine or Mother aspect, Ku, that sends forth all 
of these things into manifestation. 

Naught is there which He is not. For all 
are He and He is all And for this cause hath 
He all names, in that they are one Father's. 
And for this cause hath He Himself no name, 
in that He's Father of [them] all. 

Nowhere in all the universe is there that which 
we can speak of and say this is not God. There 
could not possibly be anything but God. There is 
no Intelligence that has not grown out of His 
Thought, hence there is no mind in all the Uni- 
verse save that which is the manifestation of His 
Mind. Apart from Him there is no Substance 
from which anything could have been made. All 
substance of whatever grade is but a modification 
of Her substance that is of Ku. There is nowhere 
any Energy save that which has come out of the 
Divine Energy through its diverse expressions 
and differentiations. There is no life save that 
which has come out of His life, no Intelligence 
save that which has emanated from His Mind, 
and no substance, save that which has come forth 
from Her Essence. Therefore, there is, and can 
never be anything in all the world save God and 
His Appearances, His expressions. All are He, 
and He is all. This soul-satisfying Pan-Theism 
is absolute, nothing else could possibly be true, 
it is the one true religion and philosophy for all 
ages and all races. He hath all names, because 
they have all come forth from Ku, having been 
engendered within Her. Also, the things to which 
we attach each and all of the names we use are in 
reality God. There being nothing that is not God, 
it follows that everything that exists is God, and 
therefore, all the things for which we have names 
are He, hence all names are names of Him. All 



64 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

naines have one Father-Mother, and as they are 
given to that which is God, they are in reality the 
names of this one Father-Mother; therefore, every 
word that we can possibly use is a name of God. 
All the names that we can possibly use are the 
names of His differentiations and manifestations, 
and hence the Pleroma of names is exhausted by 
the Pleroma of the Manifestations of God; there- 
fore no name is there left for the Perfect Essence 
of the Father-Mother ; hence hath He Himself no 
name. As He is the Absolute, and names are for 
the relative distinctions, there can be no name for 
the Unrelativity of His Absoluteness. 

Who, then, may sing Thee praise of Thee, 
or [praise] to Thee? 

No one can ever praise this God beyond all 
name, for the simple reason that no one can ever 
in all eternity do justice to His Greatness. Noth- 
ing that we may say of Him is anything but 
slander. To attribute to Him certain attributes, 
is to deny to Him those not indicated, and this is 
to slander Him. To mention any of His charac- 
teristics, is to give greater importance to them 
than to the ones not mentioned, but all the char- 
acteristics of God are of equal importance. To 
say that He is all that is to slander Him, for it 
will indicate that we mean to limit God to all that 
there is, and that would be blasphemy. Words 
will not express His Fullness, and therefore it is 
impious to try to speak of Him. We cannot praise 
Him, because the inadequacy of all praise will 
render this very praise a slander. Naught but the 
silence can express this so great God. Praise 
Him not, but keep silence in His presence. 

Whether, again, am I to turn my eyes to 
sing Thy praise, above, below, within, with- 
out? 



PHILOSOPHIA EERMETICA 65 

There is no way, no place is there about 
Thee, nor any other thing of things that are. 

The Bible says that God is in Heaven, bnt this 
is a manifest impiety, for it implies that that is 
the only place where He is to be found. Those 
who say that God is in the heart of man, are 
impious, for that localizes Him, and implies that 
He is not outside of the heart of man. It is im- 
pious to intimate that He is in any place or local- 
ity any more than in another, and it is equally 
impious to intimate that He is in all places and 
localities combined any more than He is in no 
locality at all. It was a grave impiety on the part 
of the Jews to say that God' dwelt in Jerusalem. 
It is a grave impiety on the part of the Moham- 
medans to face Mecca while praying, and in this 
way intimate that He is there more than at any 
other place. It is impious in the Christians to 
think that God is in the Churches in a sense that 
He is not also in the Saloon as well. To say that 
God is in the Altar in a different sense to that in 
which He is in the couch of the prostitute is a 
grave impiety, just as it is impious in the Catholio 
to think that He is in the Sacred Host any more 
than He is in the mortar of the mason. To God, 
there is no way, for He is the source and sustainer 
as well as the occupier of all ways. About Him 
there is no place, for He is the source, the founda- 
tion and the occupier of all places ; to Him there 
is no place. Of God no thing of all the things 
that are, is true. He is neither here nor there. 
He is neither now nor then. He is neither this 
nor that. He is neither existent nor non-existent. 
He is neither subsistent nor non-subsistent. He 
neither lives nor dies. He is neither mortal nor 
immortal. He is at once everything and nothing, 
and at the same time He is neither the one nor the 
other. He is unnamable, inexpressible, unconceiv- 
able, unthinkable. He is, He is not. 



66 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

All [are] in Thee; all are from Thee, 
Tho\i who givest all and takest naught, for 
Thou hast all and naught is there Thou hast 
not. 

Everything subsists in God, there is nothing 
that is not forever in Him. At the same time 
everything exists from God. Everything has 
come forth out of Him by emanation. He is at 
once the container and the source of all. He gives 
all, because everything that is, must originate in 
Him and must be born forth from Him. As there 
is nothing but what has originated in Him, there is 
nothing that He has not given, and as He is at all 
times generating all things unto infinity, there is 
nothing that He requires of all those things which 
He has engendered. Therefore, it is stated that He 
has all, and there is nothing that He has not. All 
idea of worship in the sense of doing something 
for God is therefore manifestly impious, assuming 
as it does that man may do something for God, 
and hence by implication that there is something 
that God needs from man. As all is in God, He 
has all, and there is nothing that He has not al- 
ready, therefore, there is nothing that man can 
offer to Him. This leads to the conclusion that 
sacrifices are in reality an offense unto Him, see- 
ing that in the very nature of things, they indicate 
that man assumes that God has need of something 
that man can give to Him. This reminds one of 
the statement in the Old Testament, "Thy Offer- 
ings, thy Meat Offerings and thy Drink Offerings 
are an abomination unto Me, if I was hungry I 
would not ask thee, for the cattle on a thousand 
hills are mine." It is quite evident that the re- 
ligion taught here by the Prophet is quite different 
from that taught by Moses. The conclusion is un- 
avoidable, that the original Jewish religion was 
that of devotion to one of the lesser gods, and that 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 67 

the Prophet was here undertaking to transform 
the religion into the worship of the God beyond 
all name. In other words, it marked the introduc- 
tion of Hermeticism into the fabric of Judaism. 
Wherever we see Eitualism discounted in favor of 
a spiritual life, we see the influence of this Be- 
ligion of the Mind. All is His, therefore, we can 
give Him nothing, as it is already His. We can- 
not praise Him, seeing that all possible praise is 
totally inadequate to do Him justice. The only 
possible service that we can render Him is to 
manifest His perfection in our life, hence, a godly 
life is the only service that can possibly be ren- 
dered to Him. 

11. And when, Father, shall I hymn 
Thee ? For none can seize Thy hour or time. 

For what, again, shall I sing hymn? For 
things that Thou hast made, or things Thou 
hast not? For things Thou hast made mani- 
fest, or things Thou hast concealed? 

How, further, shall I hymn Thee? As be- 
ing of myself? As having something of mine 
own? As being other? 

For that Thou art whatever I may be ; Thou 
art whatever I may do ; Thou art whatever I 
may speak. 

For Thou art all, and there is nothing else 
which Thou art not. Thou art all that which 
doth exist, and Thou art what doth not exist, 
— Mind when Thou thinkest, the Father when 
Thou makest, and God when Thou dost ener- 
gize, and Good and Maker of all things. 

And when, Father shall I hymn Thee? 
For none can seize Thy hour or time. 

Here we have the principle laid down that there 
is no set time in which devotion is to be paid to the 



68 PHILOSOPHIA EEBMETICA 

Father. He functions not in time. All times are the 
resuft of the manifestation, and hence do not apply 
to Him. Also, all times have been engendered from 
Him, hence they originate from Him ; and subsist 
in Him ; therefore, they are all alike His. For Him 
there can be no Holy Days, no Sacred Times, no 
hour of prayer, no Sabbath Days. All days and 
hours are alike Plis and alike to Him. There can 
be no time more appropriate than another to pay 
adoration to Him. All such distinctions apply to 
the lesser gods, but not to the Father. It follows 
therefore, that the sacredness of all times and 
seasons is a part of the service of the gods, and 
perfectly proper in their service, but that it does 
not apply to the worship of the Father-Mother. As 
He is alike in all times, being beginningless and 
endless, it follows that His service must be also 
without beginning and without end. Doubtless 
this was the meaning of the statement of our 
Brother Saul, that we should pray without ceas- 
ing, meaning that our devotion must be one con- 
tinual adoration of the All Father-Mother. 

For what, again, shall I sing hymn? For 
things that Thou hast made, or things Thou 
hast not? For things Thou hast made mani- 
fest, or things Thou hast concealed? 

What are we to praise Him for? We can only 
praise Him relatively, that is, for something in 
contradistinction to something else. Which is the 
most important, those things He has made, or the 
things that are latent in Him, and that have not 
as yet assumed individuality? For which should 
we be most grateful, those things that have come 
forth into the manifestation, or those things that 
abide within the unmanifest side of His Being? 
In the first place, we do not know, and in the 
second place it would be a manifest impiety for us 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 69 

to assume that one aspect of the Absolute God is 
of more importance than another. He is One, not 
many, and to discriminate between the diverse as- 
pects of His Divinity is to destroy His Unity, 
which is equivalent to His destruction. Such a 
deed would be equivalent to Theoside, or the mur- 
der of God ! Such discrimination is therefore, the 
blackest blasphemy possible. Therefore, do not 
praise Him for anything. He is, and that is all 
that we can say ! 

How, further, shall I hymn Thee? As be- 
ing of myself? As having something of mine 
own? As being other? 

How are we to sing His praises ? As being like 
unto us, or as being different from us ? Are we to 
praise Him because of the human attributes which 
He has, or is it to be because of His non-human 
attributes? All of our attributes are in Him and 
have come out from Him, and from Him did we 
obtain them; hence, to praise Him for being like 
unto us, is merely to praise Him for being Him- 
self ! Also, the non-human attributes are in Him 
and have been born from Him, and therefore, if 
we praise Him for being unlike us we praise Him 
for merely being like unto Himself. At the same 
time, if we praise Him for being unlike us, we 
praise Him for being unlike Himself, but how can 
any one be unlike himself? If we praise Him for 
being like unto us, we set up His likeness unto 
us, as in contrast to His unlikeness to us, and this 
makes Him inconsistent with Himself, which 
means to destroy His perfection as well as His 
Unity, which would be a grave impiety. There- 
fore, there is no way in which we can praise Him 
without being guilty of a grave impiety; there- 
fore, hearken to this eleventh commandment, 
"Thou shalt not praise the Lord thy God, for in 



70 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

the day that thou doest this thou shalt be guilty 
of blasphemy against the Most High." 

For that Thou art whatever I may be ; Thou 
art whatever I may do ; Thou art whatever I 
may speak. 

The being of man can never be anything other 
than the individualization of certain attributes of 
God. He is nothing apart from this ; hence God is 
all that any of us are, and therefore, we have no 
existence apart from Him. In ourselves we are 
absolutely nothing. The recognition of this truth 
is the true self-abnegation. Self-denial is nothing 
other than the affirmation of God. Man in himself 
does nothing. All his actions are in reality the 
mode of God's attributes expressing themselves 
under the terms of motion and rest. All of our 
acts are acts of God. Apart from Him, and in 
ourselves we do nothing. This was the message of 
the Great Master Jesus. We do nothing, God 
works in us. This is the true doctrine of non- 
action. All words come forth from Him, are en- 
gendered within Him and are brought forth into 
manifestation. We can never speak a word that 
has not previously been spoken by Him ; therefore, 
we speak no word, His words speak through us; 
hence, it is God who speaks and not us. No word 
was ever spoken by anyone save God alone, as it 
is Him speaking in all. The recognition of this 
truth is the true secret of Quietism, and the Vow 
of Silence. 

For Thou art all, and there is nothing else 
Thou art not. Thou art all that which doth 
exist, and Thou art what doth not exist, — 
Mind when Thou thinkest, and Father when 
Thou makest, and God when Thou dost ener- 
gize, and Good and Maker of all things. 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 71 

God is all, and there is nothing of all the things 
that are, that ever have been, or that will ever 
be, that He is not. Every single thing that 
has ever been, or that is, or that will ever be, 
has been engendered and made within Him, is but 
a partial individualization of Him, and in it He 
continues to abide so long as it exists. There is 
not one thing which is not He. Hence there is noth- 
ing of which we may not truly say, this is God. 
He is all that exists, for the reason that all exist- 
ing things have been conceived and made within 
Him, and have been born forth from Her, and thus 
begin their period of existence. He is all that does 
not exist, because those things that do not as yet 
exist, have been conceived and made within the 
Divine Depths, and having not as yet been born 
forth into existence continue to subsist in Her, or 
else they are in process of conception and making; 
hence, is He both that which exists and that which' 
does not exist, but subsists within Him. In His 
thinking He is the Mind; for all Thoughts origi- 
nate in this Mind; it being the true source of all 
intelligence. In His making, He is the Father and 
the Mother of all; for all that ever comes into 
being is conceived of the Mind and made in Ku; 
hence, is He the Father-Mother in His capacity of 
the maker of all things, and no one thing comes 
into being apart from this making by the Father- 
Mother. He is God in His capacity as the ener 
gizer of all that is made. All Life, all Energy, all 
"Will Force is His ; it is in fact, the action of His 
Will Force entering into all the things that are 
made that in them becomes in them, Life, Energy 
and Will. The life of anything is His Life func- 
tioning in it. The energy of anything is His 
energy functioning in it. The Will of anything, 
is His Will Force functioning in it. In the act of 
energizing all things, is He God. As the energizer 
and at the same time the energy of the universe 
both universally and particularly, He is God. He 



72 PEILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

is Good, for there is nothing Good save He-She 
alone\ and is the Maker of all things, because all 
things are made in Ku; hence, there is nothing 
which this so Great God hath not made. What is 
there that He is not? In reality it is a mistake 
to say that He has created anything. This term is 
misleading. He-She is the Father-Mother of all 
things ; and all things of whatever kind and degree 
are His-Her children, conceived of the Father and 
born of the Mother. How then can we serve this 
so great God? Only with the mind. We can but 
contemplate His Greatness, and seek to compre- 
hend Him as clearly as possible. Through this 
contemplative study of the Divine Principle, and 
in the adoration of His perfections, we may serve 
Him. Also, by doing all in our power to in- 
dividualize His attributes, and thus ensoul His 
Nature. Service of Him must be in our becoming 
like unto Him. Therefore, there is but one way to 
serve GooJ; by treading the Old, Old Path of De- 
votion joined with Gnosis. 

(For that the subtler part of matter is the 
air, of air the soul, of soul the mind, and of 
mind, God.) 

Here we have the relationship between the di- 
verse aspects of the unity of the whole. God is 
the ultimate Divine Essence. It abides within the 
Mind, which it uses as a Vehicle through which 
it manifests itself in its action on all beneath it. 
Mind dwells within Soul, permeating it through 
and through, and manifesting through it. In this 
way is mind permitted to act through the medium 
of soul upon the air. Subtle air dwells within 
matter, which it permeates and makes use of as 
its Vehicle and thereby is able to manifest in 
action on matter and all material forms. We 
might say that the objective world is the Gross 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 73 

Body of the One. The Matter is its Etheric Count- 
erpart. Air is the connecting principles between 
this and the soul. Soul is the soul, and Mind is 
the Spirit, while God is the Self or Ego hidden 
within the Spirit. Thus there is but one Being in 
which all that is, presents itself as some essential 
part of the one great whole. This sublime truth 
was vaguely hinted at in the statement in the 
poem, "All things are one harmonious whole, 
whose body nature is, and God the soul." While 
the poem states the truth rather crudely, and 
Hermes gives it with all of the grandiose force of 
our Sacred Philosophy, yet in essence the mean- 
ing is the same. This is the true Pan-Theism, or 
Omni-Theism more correctly speaking. 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

In God Alone Is Good and Elsewhere 

Nowhere. 

(Text: G. R. S. Mead; Thrice Greatest Her- 
mes; Corpus Hermeticum (VII) ; G. Par- 
they, Hermetis Trismegisti, 48-53; Pat- 
rizzi, Nova de Universis Philosophia, 14a- 
15a.) 
1. Good,0 Asclepios,is in none else save God 
alone ; nay, rather, Good is God Himself eter- 
nally. 

If it be so, [Good] must be essence, from 
every kind of motion and becoming free 
(though naught is free from It), possessed of 
stable energy around Itself, never too little, 
nor too much, an ever-full supply. [Though] 
one, yet [is It] source of all; for what sup- 
plieth all is Good. When I, moreover, say 
[supplieth] altogether [all], it is for ever Good. 
But this belongs to no one else save God 
alone. 

For He stands not in need of anything, so 
that desiring it He should be bad; nor can a 
single thing. of things that are be lost to Him, 
on losing which He should be pained, for pain 
is part of bad. Nor is there aught superior 
to Him, that He should be subdued by it; nor 
any peer to Him to do Him wrong, or [so 
that] He should fall in love on its account; 
nor aught that gives no ear to Him, whereat 
He should grow angry; nor wiser aught, for 
Him to envy. 



76 PHILOSOPHIA EERMETICA 

2. Now as all these are non-existent in His 
beings what is there left but Good alone? 

For just as naught of bad is to be found in 
such transcendent Being, so too in no one of 
the rest will Good be found. 

For in them all are all the other things — 
both in the little and the great, both in each 
severally and in this living one that's greater 
than them all and mightiest [of them]. 

For things subject to birth abound in pas- 
sions, birth in itself being passible. But where 
there's passion, nowhere is there Good; and 
where is Good, nowhere a single passion. For 
where is day, nowhere is night; and where is 
night, day is nowhere. 

Wherefore, in genesis the Good can never 
he, but only be in the ingenerate. 

But seeing that the sharing in all things 
hath been bestowed on matter, so doth it share 
in Good. 

In this way is the Cosmos good ; that, in so 
far as it doth make all things, as far as mak- 
ing goes it's Good, but in all other things it 
is not Good. For it's both passible and sub- 
ject unto motion, and maker of things pas- 
sible. 

3. Whereas in man by greater or by less of 
bad is good determined. For what is not too 
bad down here, is good ; and good down here 
is the least part of bad. 

It cannot, therefore, be that good down 
here should be quite clean of bad, for down 
here good is fouled with bad; and being 
fouled, it stays no longer good, and staying 
not it changes into bad. 

In God alone, is, therefore, Good, or rather 
Good is God Himself. 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 11 

So, then, Asclepios, the name alone of Good 
is found in men, the thing itself nowhere [in 
them], for this can never be. 

For no material body doth contain It, — a 
thing bound on all sides by bad, by labors, 
pains, desires and passions, by error and by 
foolish thoughts. 

And greatest ill of all, Asclepios, is that 
each of these things that have been said above, 
is thought down here to be the greatest good. 

And what is still an even greater ill, is 
belly-lust, the error that doth lead the band 
of all the other ills — the thing that makes us 
turn down here from Good. 

4. And I, for my own part, give thanks to 
God, that He hath cast it in my mind about 
the Gnosis of the Good, that it can never be, 
It should be in the world. For that the world 
is "fullness" of the bad, but God of Good, and 
Good of God. 

The excellencies of the Beautiful are round 
the very essence [of the Good] ; nay, they do 
seem too pure, too unalloyed; perchance 'tis 
they that are themselves Its essence. 

For one may dare to say, Asclepios, — if es- 
sence, sooth, He have — God's essence is the 
Beautiful ; the Beautiful is further also Good. 

There is no Good that can be got from ob- 
jects in the world. For all the things that fall 
beneath the eye are image-things and pictures 
as it were ; while those that do not meet [the 
eye are the realities], especially the [essence] 
of the Beautiful and Good. 

Just as the eye cannot see God, so can it not 
behold the Beautiful and Good. For that they 
are integral parts of God, wedded to Him 



78 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

alone, inseparate familiars, most beloved, 
with -whom God is Himself in love, or they 
with God. 

5. If thou canst God conceive, thou shalt 
conceive the Beautiful and Good, transcend- 
ing Light, made lighter than the Light by 
God. That Beauty is beyond compare, inimi- 
tate that Good, e'en as God is Himself. 

As, then, thou dost conceive of God, con- 
ceive the Beautiful and Good. For they can- 
not be joined with aught of other things that 
live, since they can never be divorced from 
God. 

Seek'st thou for God, thou seekest for the 
Beautiful. One is the Path that leadeth unto 
It — Devotion joined with Gnosis. 

6. And thus it is that they who do not know 
and do not tread Devotion's Path, do dare to 
call man beautiful and good, though he have 
ne'er e'en in his visions seen a whit that's 
Good, but is enwrapped with every kind of 
bad, and thinks the bad is good, and thus doth 
make unceasing use of it, and even feareth 
that it should be ta'en from him, so straining 
every nerve not only to preserve but even to 
increase it. 

Such are the things that men call good and 
beautiful, Asclepios, — things which we cannot 
flee or hate; for hardest thing of all is that 
we've need of them and cannot live without 
them. 



LESSON VI. 
The Nature of the Good. 

1. Good, Asclepios, is in none else save 
God alone; nay, rather, Good is God Himself 
eternally. 

If it be so, [Good] must be essence, from 
every kind of motion and becoming free 
(though naught is free from It), possessed of 
stable energy around Itself, never too little, 
nor too much, an ever-full supply. [Though] 
one, yet [is it] source of all; for what sup- 
plieth all is Good. When I, moreover, say 
[supplieth] altogether [all], it is for ever 
Good. But this belongs to no one else save 
God alone. 

For He stands not in need of anything, so 
that desiring it He should be bad; nor can a 
single thing of things that are be lost to Him, 
on losing which He should be pained ; for pain 
is part of bad. 

Nor is there aught superior to Him, that 
He should be subdued by it; nor any peer to 
Him to do Him wrong, or [so that] He should 
fall in love on its account; nor aught that 
gives no ear to Him, whereat he should grow 
angry; nor wiser aught, for Him to envy. 

Good, Asclepios, is none else save God 
alone, nay, rather, Good is God Himself eter- 
nally. 

There is no such distinction as Good and God, 
they are svnonyrnous terms. Good is the nature 

79 



80 PHILOSOPHIA EEBMETICA 

of the essence of God, and it exists nowhere else 
save in God alone. Goodness is simply another 
name~f or Divinity or Godness. Therefore, when we 
speak of Good we should understand that we are 
merely saying God. Good being identical with God 
Himself, an understanding of the nature of God 
will give us an understanding of the nature of 
the Good. At the same time it is to be understood 
that the Good is merely one aspect of the nature of 
God. God is the Mind, He is the Father, and He 
is also God and then He is Good. Good is in a 
certain sense the Moral side of the Mother aspect 
of God. However, this Moral aspect of the 
Motherhood of God, must be understood in a much 
more comprehensive sense than that which we 
apply to morality in the accepted sense of the 
term. We have already seen the nature of God as 
the Mind, the Father and as God. His nature as 
the Good is yet to be explained. We must now 
see the nature of our Good Mother ; therefore, lend 
thine «ear and open thy heart that I may expound 
to this the holy mystery of the Goodness of the 
Mother ! 

If it be so, [Good] must be essence, from 
every kind of motion and becoming free 
(though naught is free from It), possessed of 
stable energy round itself, never too little, 
nor too much, an ever-full supply. [Though] 
one, yet [is it] source of all; for what sup- 
plieth all is Good. When I, moreover, say 
[supplieth] altogether [all], it is for ever 
Good. But this belongs to no one else save 
God alone. 

Good will have to be an essence, seeing that it 
is an aspect of the Unmanifest God. The Divine 
Essence is Ku; and hence, the mystery of the 
Good, is none other than the mystery of Ku. Ku 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 81 

is the Feminine and Maternal Essence of the 
Divine Principle. This essence is perfectly free 
within itself. Every possible motion transpires 
within its depths, and yet it is controlled by none 
of those motions; for the reason that when the 
cycle of each motion has been completed, the es- 
sence returns into the passive state once again. 
After each cycle of motion, it returns to the state 
of rest. Yet, while it has the power to become 
free from all of its motions, nothing can ever be 
free from the absolute control of this Essence, 
seeing that all things are made by it, and that 
nothing can ever come into being apart from its 
operations. This Ku is possessed of stable energy 
which completely surrounds It, so that all of Its 
motions are confined within this wall of energy. 
Its motions take place within Its depths, not on Its 
outer rim; hence, all the actions of Ku are con- 
cealed, and can never be approached. The 
mystery of the Womb of Ku can never be violated 
by either gods or men, even the Father respects 
its sacred seclusion. This zone of stable energy is 
at all times exactly sufficient to confine the sphere 
of activity and motion and rest, and also feed it 
so that substance will at all times be provided for 
making of all things. This Ku is an absolute 
Unity. It is not composed of elements but is in 
Itself one Simple Element absolutely indivisible in 
its nature. It is this Essence that supplies sub- 
stance and energy to all things that ever come into 
being. In this way is It the one and only source 
of everything. Because It is the source that makes 
all, and that supplies to all, the completion of its 
substance and energy, is It termed Good, seeing 
that all comes from It. As It derives assistance 
from nothing else, but is absolutely self-sufficient 
in Itself, is It of the nature of Good, lacking noth- 
ing. Because It supplieth altogether all, the time 
can never be that anything should ever be sup- 
plied by anything apart for this Ku; and hence, 



82 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

is She forever Good. If Ku was thus absolutely 
self-sufficient, and everything of all that is, was 
absolutely dependent upon Her for its very sub- 
sistence, there would be no place for God, as She 
would be entirely independent of Him and could 
of Herself do all that God can do, verily She is 
God. 

For He stands not in need of anything, so 
that desiring it He should be bad ; nor can a 
single thing of things that are be lost to Him, 
on losing which He should be pained; for pain 
is part of bad. 

Unfortunately, the masculine gender is used in 
the text when speaking of the Good, which is in- 
correct, seeing that the Good is nothing other than 
the Divine Essence which is Ku, the Mother ; and 
therefore, we will restore the feminine gender, as 
is should be and whenever speaking of Ku we will 
say She, but when speaking of the Mind we will 
say He. She stands not in need of anything be- 
cause everything that ever comes into being is 
made by Her ; and as She can of Her own Essence 
make all things unto Infinity, did She need any- 
thing, she would spontaneously make it. In this 
way, She can never stand in need of anything. She 
can never desire anything ; because of the fact that 
there is nothing that has not been made in Her, 
and it ever remains in Her even after it has been 
born forth into existence, it still subsists in Her; 
therefore, there is never at any time, any thing of 
all things that are that is not in Her. Therefore, 
She can never desire anything because of the fact 
that all things are in Her. Her infinite capacity to 
make, means that there is not any possible thing 
that She does not make; Her making being in- 
finite, and hence, She can desire nothing. She 
cannot be bad, because She lacketh nothing to 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 83 

make Her perfect and whole. All limitation is 
bad, but as She is absolutely unlimited, She cannot 
be bad; therefore is She the perfect and absolute 
Good forever. A single thing of things that are 
can never be lost to Her, because of the fact that 
everything that has been born into existence, yet 
subsists in Her; hence, nothing can ever be lost 
to Her. Hence, She can never lose anything, be- 
cause all things are perpetually present in Her. 
Therefore, She can never suffer pain, by being 
separated from anything that is Hers. Pain is 
part of bad, but as She is in Herself perfectly and 
completely self-sufficient, She can never suffer 
pain from the absence of anything, seeing that 
nothing can ever be absent from Her; therefore 
is She without pain; and therefore is She Good, 
being without the bad condition of pain. 

Nor is there aught superior to Him, that 
He should be subdued by it; nor any peer to 
Him to do Him wrong, or [so that] he should 
fall in love on its account; nor aught that 
gives no ear to Him, whereat He should grow 
angry; nor wiser aught, for Him to envy. 

Inasmuch as all things are made by Her, and 
continue to exist only because She continues to 
sustain them, and there is nothing of all that is 
but owes its existence completely to Her ; there can 
be nothing having greater power than She ; hence, 
nothing can ever subdue Her, or in the slightest 
degree influence Her. She controlls all, but is 
controlled by nothing; therefore is She Good; 
for it is bad to be subject to anything apart from 
oneself. As all power originates in Her, and re- 
mains in Her; there being no power but Hers, 
She can suffer no injury at all, and hence She can 
never be wronged in the slightest degree. As all 
power is Hers no one has any power apart from 



84 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMET1CA 

Her; hence, She has no peer. In this is She Good, 
for it is bad, if any one is able to exercise any 
power against you of which you have not at all 
times perfect control. As She stands alone, and 
all existence is due to Her, and in fact remains in 
Her, She can see nothing apart from Herself, as 
there is nothing apart from Herself for Her to 
see ; therefore, there is nothing with which She can 
ever fall in love. It is very bad to be in love ; for 
the one in love, is no longer self-sufficient even in 
his happiness, for it now depends upon the wishes 
of his loved one ; and no one is fortunate who de- 
pends upon any one or anything outside of himself 
for his happiness. In this She is Good, because 
there is nothing but Herself for Her to consider, 
and in this She is Good. As all things that are are 
the production of Herself and have been made by 
Her, their nature and their will is the product of 
Hers, and hence, there is nothing having the capac- 
ity to will different from Her; hence, no one has 
the power to disobey Her. All must express Her 
will at all times. As no thing is able to do other 
than as She wills, they cannot do other than please 
Her; hence, it is impossible for Her to ever grow 
angry. In fact, as there is no existence apart from 
Her, there is nothing at which She may bcome 
angry. All wisdom is engendered within Her, and 
flows forth from Her, hence there is no wisdom in 
all existence save Her wisdom; therefore, all the 
wisdom that all things may have is possessed in 
common with Her, and it is in fact, Her wisdom 
and not theirs and as no one can know anything 
that She does not know there is nothing in all the 
universe for Her to envy. Therefore is She ab- 
solutely Good, seeing that it would be impossible 
for Her to ever become any better. This is the 
essence of Goodness, that one cannot possibly be 
any better than one is already. Ku is Good be- 
cause She cannot possibly be any better than She 
is already and also, because it would be impossible 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 85 

for Her to ever lose any of the goodness that She 
has, and thus become worse. To be in no possible 
danger of losing any portion of one's Goodness, 
and to be so Good that the addition of any amount 
of Goodness could not possibly add to the present 
sum of one's Goodness is to be the Pleroma of the 
perfect Good. To be this is to be Good indeed. 
As Ku is all this to Infinity, She is absolutely 
Good. Therefore, is She the Good. She is thus 
the Moral aspect of the Divinity. She is the 
Mother of all, and in this rests Her Goodness, that 
She is the Infinite Mother of ail possible things, 
thus is She the self-sufficient Mother the Good. 
Attribute Goodness to no one save Mother Ku; 
for if thou dost thou wilt be guilty of a very 
grave impiety; for thou wilt have said that there 
is another absolute. Mother save the One Absolute 
Mother. This will necessitate comparison between 
the two, and that will be equivalent to the denial 
of the Absoluteness of the Mother. To deny Her 
absoluteness, is to deny Her as the Mother of all, 
and hence, as thy Mother; which is equivalent 
to the destruction of the Mother ; and this would be 
Matricide, and the Matricide of the Good Mother 
Herself, of Immortal Ku, the Good. This will be 
morally equivalent to the destruction of the Good, 
and hence, to the banishing of Good from the 
whole universe and that which is back of it. See 
that thou be not guilty of this fearful crime; 
therefore, call not anything Good but the Good. 
There is no Good but the Good. There is no Good 
but the Mother. There is no Good but Ku. There 
is no Good but God. See that thou never separate 
Good from God. They are one and never are they 
twain. Good and God is One. Thus my son, do I 
initiate thee into the Gnosis of the Good ; and the 
Gnosis of the Good is the Gnosis of Ku; which is 
the Wisdom of God; and this is the Intuition of 
the Mother. This is also the Religion of the Mind. 
See, therefore, that thou shalt never of this 



86 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

Holy Gnosis fail; for this is the Gnosis that will 
lead thee, my son, directly to the Maternal Heart 
of Heaven and to the Good Mother's love. All 
Good is of Her; all Good is in Her, and in Her 
only canst thou find the Good. Seek it not else- 
where; for if so, thou wouldst impious and un- 
dutiful be. 



1 



LESSON VII. 
The Pleroma of the Bad. 

2. Now as all these are non-existent in His 
being, what is there left but Good alone? 

For just as naught of bad is to be found in 
such transcendent Being, so too in no one of 
the rest will Good be found. 

For in them all are all the other things — 
both in the little and the great, both in each 
severally and in this living one that's greater 
than them all and mightiest [of them]. 

For things subject to birth abound in pas- 
sions, birth in itself being passible. But 
where there's passion, nowhere is there Good; 
and where is Good, nowhere a single passion. 
For where is day, nowhere is night; and 
where is night, day is nowhere. 

Wherefore in genesis the Good can never 
he, but only be in the ingenerate. 

But seeing that the sharing of all things 
hath been bestowed on matter, so doth it share 
in Good. 

In this way is the Cosmos good, that, in so 
far as it doth make all things, as far as mak- 
ing goes it's Good, but in all other things it 
is not Good. For it's both passible and sub- 
ject unto motion, and maker of things pas- 
sible. 

Now as all these are non-existent in His 
being, what is there left but Good alone? 

All of the things which are of the nature of bad 

87 



88 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

having been enumerated and all of them having 
been seen to be absent from the being of God, it 
follows that the sum-total of the bad having been 
eliminated from Her, that which remains is of the 
nature of the Good ; hence, there is in God or Ku 
nothing but Good. If so, then She is the Pleroma 
of the Good, but if so, the fullness of the Good 
being in Her, there can be no part of Good left 
for anything else; hence, all Good having been 
contained within Her, nothing else but bad will be 
left; therefore, all that has been born out from Her 
must be bad. The entire realm below Her must, 
therefore, be the Pleroma of the Bad as She is 
the Pleroma of the Good. If the world without 
Her is the Pleroma of the bad, then it contains 
the fullness of the bad, and hence, there will not 
be left a single bad thing which it does not con- 
tain ; therefore, there can be no bad thing in Her ; 
hence, She is absolutely Good. 

• 
For just as naught of bad is to be found in 
such transcendent Being, so too in no one of 
the rest will Good be found. 

The very principle of Good can only be found 
in Ku. As we have shown, the Good is absolutely 
dependent upon those conditions which cannot pos- 
sibly subsist in anything other than in the Ab- 
solute Divine Essence, and were those conditions 
which are essential to the very constitution of the 
Good present in anything else, they would of 
necessity constitute it the Pleroma of the at- 
tributes of the Divine Essence, and hence, it would 
be the Divine Essence. This would mean that 
there were two Absolute Divine Essences ; but if 
so, there would be no Absolute Divine Essence, 
seeing that there can be but one Absolute any- 
thing. Thus the Divine Essence itself would be 
destroyed. However, we have shown that nothing 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 89 

can exist, except it be made in the Divine Essence ; 
therefore, this Divine Essence is; hence, nowhere 
else can Good be found. 

For in them all are all the other things — 
both in the little and the great, both in each 
severally and in this living one that's greater 
than them all and mightiest [of them]. 

In ail the Manifestation and the Kosmos below 
it, are to be found all the things not Good, all the 
things that are lacking in or absent from Ku. As 
those things being absent is what constitutes Ku 
Good, it follows that their presence in the Mani- 
festation and in the Kosmos constitutes it bad, 
seeing that it is filled with innumerable bad things. 
This is true both of the greatest and of the small- 
est parts of it, and of all the intermediary stages 
between these two extremes. This is true of them 
all each taken severally and also in the living one, 
the hylic animal, the Kosmos as a single life or a 
living creature, in other words, the Kosmos as a 
whole, as a unit, and also every separate part of it, 
is bad in all of its attributes. Great and mighty 
as is the Kosmos, it is essentially bad, because of 
the fact that the forces that animate it and that 
cause its diverse transformations are each and all 
of the nature of bad, and not one of them, par- 
takes of the nature of the Good. 

For things subject to birth abound in pas- 
sions, birth in itself being passible. But 
where there's passion, nowhere is there Good, 
and where is Good, nowhere a single pas- 
sion. For where is day, nowhere is night, 
and where is night, day is nowhere. 

All things that are subject to birth abound 
in passion, birth in itself being through pas- 



90 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

sion. All genesis being through passion. All 
things generated being generated through pas- 
sion. For this reason, nothing generated can 
possibly be Good, seeing that it is passion 
that has generated them. All things that have 
been generated through the action of passion, 
have embodied the passions that have generated 
them and thus partake of those passions. Where 
there is passion there can be no such thing as 
Good. All bad things are the result of passion. 
Passion can never lead to the Good. Passion and 
the Good are as far asunder as are the poles as 
distinct as the opposition of day and night. Not 
one Good thing ever came through passion. In 
fact, the Good can never be generated. This is 
of course, true seeing that the Good is self-exist 
ent; hence, the Good having to be self -existent to 
be Good, it cannot be generated by something else, 
seeing that if it was, it would lose its character of 
self-existence, and hence, would no longer be 
Good, out would be bad. Thus because being gen- 
erated, the fruitage of generation, badness would 
inhere in it. In this way it is to be seen that all 
things that have come into being through genesis 
that is everything that has been generated by 
something else, which means the entire Kosmos 
and everything that is in it, will be bad per se. 

Wherefore, in genesis the Good can never 
be, but only be in the ingenerate. 

The Good can never be generated, it must at all 
times be in that which has never been generated; 
hence, in the ingenerate. The Good can never 
come into being, seeing that to do so, it will de- 
pend upon that which brought it into being and 
the very Esse of the Good is to be dependent 
upon nothing but itself. God cannot make any- 
thing Good, He can only be the Good. As the 
Good must be sufficient unto Itself, and needing 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 91 

nothing from anything except Itself, It can depend 
npon nothing for anything and still be Good. Thus 
it is to be seen at once that only the ingenerate, 
that is that which enjoys endless and beginningless 
duration within itself and of its own power, can 
ever be Good. Thus God alone is Good. The 
Kosmos, both in itself and in each and all of its 
parts is bad, seeing that it has an engendered 
existence, and that it came into being, not of 
itself and through the exercise of its own power, 
but through the power of God. Being the work of 
God and not of itself, it is bad. God can do no 
Good deed, He can only be Good in Himself. The 
Good can never be engendered. 

But seeing that the sharing in all things 
hath been bestowed on matter, so doth it 
share in Good. 

While God alone is the One in whom Absolute 
Good is to be found, yet has God constituted mat- 
ter so that it will mirror and reflect all of His 
attributes. In this way, is the Goodness of God 
reflected and mirrored in matter. It has a re- 
flected Good, but not a positive Good as has Ku. 
Matter has a portion of Good, an element of Good 
reflected in it, but its true nature is bad and this 
reflected Good is dominated by the inherent bad. 
While the Good is but mirrored in matter, the bad 
is inherently present in it. 

In this way is the Cosmos Good ; that, in so 
far as it doth make all things, as far as mak- 
ing goes it's Good, but in all other things it 
is not Good. For it's both passible and sub- 
ject unto motion, and maker of things pas- 
sible. 

The Kosmos is Good in so far as it makes all 
things. It is Good in its capacity as the Maker, 
but in so far as it is made it is bad. The Kosmos 



92 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

is made by Ku, and therefore, is it the creature 
of genesis, and of passion and in that is it bad. 
At the same time, the Kosmos as the living one, 
generates the things which it contains, and in this 
respect it is Good. In other words, anything is 
Good in what it generates, inasmuch as it has 
power over it, but it is bad in so far as it is subject 
to generation, and hence, to the power of the one 
who generates it. Inasmuch as it is passible and 
subject unto motion, and therefore, the creature 
and subject of what is above it, it is bad, but in- 
asmuch as it is capable of making other things pas- 
sible and subjecting them unto its motions is it 
Good. All situations in which it is the Creator 
render it Good, but in all cases where it is created 
by Ku, it is bad. This gives us a perfect criterion 
by which we can determine the Good and the bad 
that may be in anything. All things are Good 
in so far as they engender something else as their 
creatures, but they are bad in so far as they are 
engendered by something else. Therefore, bad- 
ness consists in being subject to, and dependent 
upon something outside itself, while Goodness con- 
sists in having something subject to it and de- 
pendent upon it for its existence. To illustrate, 
women are Good in so far as they give birth to 
children, but they are all bad in so far as they 
have been born of woman, and therefore, owe their 
life to their having been born. Goodness then is 
nothing other than the measure of one's power, 
while badness is nothing other than the measure of 
the foreign power to which one may be subject. 
The Kosmos then is a mixture of Good and bad ; 
Good in so far as it is the generator of things, and 
bad in so far as it is being generated ; Good in so 
far as things are subject unto it, but bad in so far 
as it is itself subject unto the Will of God and unto 
the generative potency of Ku. On the other hand, 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 93 

Ku is absolutely Good, because while being gener- 
ated by nothing and owing Her existence or rather 
being, to nothing at all, She is the Generatrix and 
the Maker of all, even the Kosmos itself. 



LESSON VIII. 
The Inherent Badness of Man. 

3. Whereas in man by greater or less of 
bad is good determined. For what is not too 
bad down here, is good ; and good down here 
is the least part of bad. 

It cannot therefore, be that good down here 
should be quite clean of bad, for down here 
good is fouled with bad, and being fouled, 
it stays no longer good, and staying not it 
changes into bad. 

In God alone, is, therefore, Good, or rather 
Good is God Himself. 

So then, Asclepios, the name alone of Good 
is found in men, the thing itself nowhere [in 
them], for this can never be. 

For no material body doth contain It, — a 
thing bound on all sides by bad, by labors, 
pains, desires and passions, by error and by 
foolish thoughts. 

And greatest ill of all, Asclepios, is that 
each of these things that have been said 
above, is thought down here to be the great- 
est good. 

And what is still an even greater ill, is 
belly-lust, the error that doth lead the band 
of all the other ills — the thing that makes us 
turn down here from Good. 

Whereas in man by greater or by less of 
bad is good determined. For what is not too 
bad down here, is good ; and good down here 
is the least part of bad. 

95 



96 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 

In man there is no such thing as Absolute Good, 
or as the Pure Good, as is the case in God. Mian is 
at all times made up of a blending of Good and 
bad. The goodness or the badness of a man is 
merely a matter of the percentage of each that is 
present in his makeup. In him, goodness is merely 
relative. If the good is greater in percentage than 
the bad, he is called a good man, while if the per- 
centage of badness is greater than that of goodness 
he is called a bad man. There are no absolutely 
good men, or absolutely bad men. The good man 
is relatively good, while the bad man is relatively 
bad. We speak only in relative terms when we 
speak of the Good that is down here. "We can 
never attribute absolute Good to anything save 
God alone. 

It cannot, therefore, be that good down 
here should be quite clean of bad, for down 
here -good is fouled with bad, and being fouled, 
it stays no longer good, and staying not it 
changes into bad. 

Down here, in the material world and in the 
kosmos generally, good can never be quite clean 
of bad. The Good that is in the world does not 
remain pure, but blends with the bad. The two do 
not remain separate but unite, for the purpose of 
kosmic evolution, so that those aspects of the 
kosmos that are in themselves good, become 
through their action in conjunction with bad, of the 
nature of bad themselves. This union of the bad 
with the good, tends to foul the good so that it 
stays no longer good, but through the manifesta- 
tion of the elements of the bad, things good, be- 
come bad in time. This will be readily understood 
when we realize that the only function of kosmos 
is its making of things, and as all the things which 
it makes are bad things ; the making of those bad 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 97 

things, will in course of time transform the making 
process so that it will also become bad. In this 
way is it that the good in kosmos becomes thor- 
oughly bad, so far as all practical purposes are 
concerned. 

In God alone, is, therefore, Good, or rather 
Good is God Himself. 

Look not for the Good in anything save only God 
alone. There only is the making uninfluenced by 
the thing made. There only is the making free 
from all other influences. Good is the nature of 
God, and hence, nothing which is not God can pos- 
sibly be Good. Also bear in mind that it is only 
in God Unmanifest that Good is to be found. It 
abides not in the Manifest God even. 

So then, Asclepios, the name alone of Good 
is found in men, the thing itself nowhere [in 
them], for this can never be. 

Man speaks the name of Good, because he ever 
holds the ideal of Good. Were it not for this ideal, 
man would go to pieces in no time. It is this 
ideal of Good that molds the human race along 
moral lines. Were this ideal to become lost, man 
would sink into animalism at once. All the forces 
of an uplifting nature in human society are the 
expressions of that longing after the perfect Good 
that are ever present in the human heart. At the 
same time, we must bear in mind that this ideal 
for the Good is one utterly unattainable on the part 
of man. His work is to seek after the Good, but 
never to find it. It is the quest for the Good that 
elevates him, though he never finds it, he purges 
out a certain amount of the bad which ever en- 
cumbers his nature. At the same time it must be 
borne in mind, that no one ever lives a good life. 



98 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

He can never practice the good, lie can only love it, 
and admire it as the most desirable of all things 
conceivable, but to actually realize it, is utterly 
impossible. But while the realization of the Good 
can never be, yet the seeking after it, is the means 
of all the uplift of soul that is possible here below. 

For no material body doth contain it, — a 
thing bound on all sides by bad, by labors, 
pains, desires and passions, by error and by 
foolish thoughts. 

The Good can never be contained within a ma- 
terial body. It is foolish to think that any religion 
or philosophy will enable any one while living in a 
material body to attain the Good. It is impossible 
for any one to do good, or live a good life, so long 
as he lives in a material body. The material en- 
vironment, which the body provides, and which is 
essential to the very life within the body is es- 
sentially bad. The body is bound on all sides by 
bad. One of the greatest of these ills is labour. 
By what possible process of reasoning man ever 
enabled himself to reach the insane opinion that 
labour was a blessing, I am bound to confess I 
cannot understand. It is a great evil that man has 
to work for a living. Think of what it means to 
have to devote hours of time every day to the mere 
drudgery of providing for the body, in order that 
it may continue to exist. The farmer spends at 
least half of his lifetime in the needless task of 
keeping alive. He spends at least twelve hours out 
of the twenty-four providing food and shelter for 
his body. Eight more hours must be spent in 
sleep in order that his useless carcass may be re- 
stored for the work of the next day. At the very 
least, he spends another hour feeding his body to 
keep it alive. This leaves him three hours out of 
the twenty-four, or one-eighth of the time in which 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 99 

he may do something else besides keep the body 
going. However, he is so tired by this time that 
he can do little with this time save rest his tired 
body. He has bnt one-eighth of his time left to 
himself, and he cannot make more than one-third 
use of that, so that we might say, twenty-three 
twenty-fourths of his time is taken up by his body, 
and only one twenty-fourth part of it can he use 
for any purpose of his own. Take the case of his 
wife, and it is even worse. No wonder that the 
wives of farmers never have any intelligence! 
When do they ever have the time to devote to their 
higher nature? The state of the business man is 
about as bad, and the skilled worker, who is in the 
best position of all of them, has to devote eight 
hours to labor and eight to sleep, besides another 
hour to go to and from his work, and at least an 
hour to feeding his body. This leaves to the most 
fortunate of all, a maximum of six hours, or one- 
fourth of his time, to be devoted to anything else 
than the mere keeping of the body alive. How can 
people be expected to evolve in a condition in 
which they have to devote the major portion of 
their time and energies to the mere work of keep- 
ing alive? Where do they find either time or 
energy to devote to the cultivation of the soul? 
And yet, we have to work this way, simply be- 
cause we have a material body to keep alive. 
Truly, living is a great inconvenience! It is a 
great ill, that this body of ours keeps us chained to 
labours at a time when we would much rather de- 
vote our time to study, meditation and the quest 
for truth. But as though it were not enough that 
we should labor all our lives for the bare neces- 
sities of life, simply in order to live, we are called 
upon to suffer pains innumerable. And there are 
those so hateful as to assure us that it is good for 
us to suffer pain! It may be good for us, but I 
tell you it is darned disagreeable ! But, as though 
this was not enough, we are called upon to be all 



100 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 



our lives, the victims of desires that we can never 
gratify^. We may try to fool ourselves by saying 
that it is not desires that we feel, that it is ambi- 
tions and aspirations ! Be that as it may, are those 
ambitions and aspirations realized? They are the 
whips to drive us on to greater exertions, after a 
will o' the wisp that will never be realized. We 
are also the victims of innumerable passions, which 
shake us to pieces, and render that philosophic 
calm so essential to the life of the soul, an utter 
impossibility. Our purest and highest impulses, 
and our greatest virtues, drive us into unrequited 
desires and destructive passions. We may dignify 
our passions by calling them love and devotion, 
but these have the same effect and are in truth 
passions. Our best effort is full of labor and sor- 
row. What could be greater ill than this ? But our 
senses make a playground of our mind,- and lead- 
ing us astray, breed errors and foolish thoughts 
which gender mental clarity an utter impossibility. 
In other words, our entire life in the body is a 
direct conspiracy in restraint of all soul life. The 
life of the soul cannot flourish in the body. But 
as though this were not enough, we are not freed 
from this inconvenience by death. The limitations 
and inconveniences of this life have caused us to 
accumulate a mass of Karma that must be worked 
out in the after-death state, and the moment these 
labours are completed, and we are in a position 
where the soul can lead its own life, we have to 
incarnate in another body and do the same darned 
thing over again! Truly is misery inseparable 
from all sentient existence ! And yet there are 
such colossal liars in the world that they are able 
to convince themselves that life is a blessing, and 
to actually take an optimistic view of this ill of 
all the ills conceivable! 



And greatest ill of all, Asclepios, is that 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 101 

each of these things that have been said above 
is thought down here to be the greatest good. 

Man in his stupidity thinks that it is good to 
labour all his life through in order that he may 
continue to live ! Think of the folly of it, we have 
to consume all of the powers of our being in order 
that we may continue to live and labour, and yet 
we think that it is good that we have to do this ! 
And after all we are without exception playing a 
losing game. With all of our efforts to keep alive, 
we cannot do it ! The average span of life is only 
thirty-eight years ! Seventy years has been fixed 
as the limit and the very strong may live to be 
eighty, and now and then one may reach the age 
of ninety, but as a general rule, he is absolutely 
good for nothing by that time and is a burden to 
others, who must keep him alive as well as them- 
selves. 4 Whenever any one dies, it is simply be- 
cause he has failed in this struggle to keep alive. 
And men think that this hopeless struggle to keep 
alive is the greatest good ! What fools! A great 
portion of the time we are racked with pain, and 
yet we will endure these pains for years rather 
than get rid of them by ceasing to live ! We actu- 
ally think that a life of pain is a good thing ! The 
endless struggles for the realization of desires that 
are never realized, and that each of us know will 
never be realized, is also thought to be good. Hav- 
ing the soul torn by passion, is also thought to be 
a good thing ! And furthermore, we think that it 
is good to have our understanding marred by error 
and foolish thinking. We actually think that it is 
better to be fools that it would be to be wise. This 
insanity is expressed in the desire that we may 
never lose our illusions, and in the saying that 
" where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." 
We actually think that it is better for us to live in 
ignorance and error than it would be to come into 
a knowledge of the truth! This life of the body 



102 PUILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

such as it is, is the highest dream of the majority. 
There are those in the Christian Religion, who can 
see nothing more desirable than that they should 
spend an eternity in this same condition, with this 
material body rendered immortal. They actually 
pray for this condition to come soon. They can- 
not even dream of any relief in the realm of 
heaven. Their heaven is the endless duration of 
this very condition that the wise must deplore, 
though submitting to it for the reason that they 
have no way of helping themselves. What depths 
of ignorance, what depth of impiety, to accuse the 
Good God of such an outrage, as to perpetuate this 
curse of physical existence throughout eternity ! 

And what is still an even greater ill, is 
belly-lust, the error that doth lead the band 
of all the other ills — the thing that makes us 
turn down here from God. 

An even greater ill than all those that we have 
mentioned, is this belly-lust, or the craving for 
food and for whatever will gratify the physical ap- 
petites. These appetites make us think that their 
gratification is the all important end of life, and 
besides this we have no desire for the Good. Many 
very high sounding terms have been used for this 
belly-lust, such as Economic Determinism, The 
Materialist Conception of History, Self-Preserva* 
tion, Physical Necessity, etc., but the true name is 
belly-lust. This is the correct name because it in- 
dicates that it is a purely animal condition, and 
that we are animals and are thus giving way to this 
beastly nature of ours whenever we are guided by 
this lust. As if it were not pnough that we should 
have to eat continually in order to keep this miser- 
able body alive, we are continually devising new 
dainties that will tickle the palate, and render our 
eating more and more of a gratification of belly- 



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every ardfetal way thai 
IL B^hr-Ios- 








ills _i- 



104 PHILOSOPEIA HERMETIC A 

which is frankly hell at its best, and at its 
worst,^ something for the description of which 
language is totally inadequate. It is, of course, 
true that through asceticism, self-denial, ab- 
stinence etc., one may to a certain extent, restrain 
these evils, and to some extent rise above them; 
but to entirely escape them while in the body is 
quite impossible. Hence, it is quite impossible 
for one living in the body to attain the Good. 
Also, we do not escape this condition when we 
leave the body at death. The Astral Body is the 
Body of Desires, and as all of the desires of this 
mundane life continue after we separate from the 
body, being located not in the physical body, but 
in the Astral Body, they continue there, and 
hence, we are subject to them to the same extent 
that we were while in the physical body. This 
being the case, we can see at once that so long as 
the astral life continues, that is, so long as we 
live on' the Astral Plane, we cannot escape those 
desires that will act as an insurmountable barrier 
in the way of our reaching the Good. But we do 
not reach the Good in Devachan. When we leave 
the Astral Plane and the Astral Body behind us, 
we enter Devachan clothed in our Mental Body; 
and as it is made up of our thinking while in the 
physical body, it is surcharged with our errors 
and our foolish thoughts, and hence, can only 
express erroneous and foolish thinking there. 
This bars us from the conception of the Good 
even while in Devachan. Now so long as the soul 
has any one of these three material vestures, it 
cannot reach the Good. Only by passing entirely 
beyond all these things can the Good be reached. 
In fact, the Good can be reached only in Nirvana. 
For this reason, the Buddhists show their true 
wisdom, and their grasp of the Gnosis of the 
Good when they spurn everything else save 
Nirvana. So long as we are on the tempestuous 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 105 

sea of Birth and Death we can never reach the 
Good. Only when we have crossed to the other 
shore and have entered the haven of Nirvana and 
have experienced its perfect and Blissful Eest 
will we ever be able to find the Good. Seeing 
that in this material existence we can never 
realize the Good, what should we do? Live as 
near its realization as we possibly can, and ever 
hold up to our consciousness the ideal of the 
Good, realizing all the time that it is an unat- 
tainable ideal, but yet ever hold it as the ideal 
of life, the standard by which all is to be judged. 



LESSON IX. 
The Beautiful and The Good. 

And I, for my own part, give thanks to 
God, that He hath cast it in my mind about 
the Gnosis of the Good, that it can never be 
It should be in the world. For that the world 
is "fullness" of the bad, but God of Good, and 
Good of God. 

The excellencies of the Beautiful are round 
the very essence [of the Good] ; nay, they do 
seem too pure, too unalloyed; perchance 'tis 
they that are themselves Its essences. 

For one may dare to say, Asclepios, — if es- 
sence, sooth, He have — God's essence is the 
Beautiful ; the Beautiful is further also Good. 

There is no Good that can be got from ob- 
jects in the world. For all the things that fall 
beneath the eye are image-things and pictures 
as it were ; while those that do not meet [the 
eye are the realities], especially the [essence] 
of the beautiful and Good. 

Just as the eye cannot see God, so can it not 
behold the Beautiful and Good. For that they 
are integral parts of God, wedded to Him 
alone, inseparate familiars, most beloved, 
with whom God is Himself in love, or they 
with God. 

And I, for my own part, give thanks to God, 
that He hath cast it in my mind about the 
Gnosis of the Good, that it can never be It 
should be in the world. For that the world is 

107 



108 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 

"fullness" of the bad, but God of Good, and 

Good of God. 

The Good can never be in the world or kosmos. 
The kosmos is the Pleroma or the complete full- 
ness of the bad. The Good can never live in a 
body, but only in the bodiless. No matter how 
great or how small the body may be, the Good can 
never find expression in it. This applies to all 
forms of whatever nature they may be. The 
kosmos taken as a whole, is limited in this way 
also. It is of the very nature of the kosmos that 
it must be the embodiment of all that is bad, but 
that the Good can never manifest itself through 
it. This is a fundamental characteristic of the 
kosmos, and hence, there can never be any excep- 
tion to this rule. God is the Pleroma of the 
Good, and Good is the Pleroma of God as we have 
previously indicated. For this reason, the Good 
and Go # d are to be taken as interchangeable terms. 
They merely indicate diverse functions exercised 
by the same Divine Principle. They are the two 
simultaneous expressions of the same Divine 
Unity, and in that sense are they One. 

The excellencies of the Beautiful are 
round the very essence of the Good ; nay, they 
do seem too pure, too unalloyad; perchance 
'tis they that are themselves Its essences. 

The Beautiful is also at one with the Good. 
We stated before that the Good was in a certain 
sense the Moral aspect of Ku. It is in Her as- 
pect as the Maker that She is the Good. Also 
in this function as the Maker is She the Beau- 
tiful. Just as Good is the moral side of the 
making of Ku, so does the Beautiful represent 
Her Graces and Accomplishments employed in 
this making. The Beautiful subsists in the Es- 



PHILOSOPHIA EEBMETICA 109 

sence of Ku, and nowhere else. This essence of 
Ku is absolute Beauty. "We can never separate 
It from Beauty or Beauty from it. True Beauty 
is the harmony, the symmetry, the Grace of the 
makings of Ku. There is no true Beauty save 
that of the Mother Ku. It is Her very essence 
manifesting or acting as Beauty, that is the one 
and only Beauty. All else is ugly in comparison 
with Her. 

For one may dare to say, Asciepios, — if es- 
sence, sooth, He have-God's essence is the 
Beautiful; the Beautiful is further also Good. 

The essence of God, that is Ku, is the Beauti- 
ful, that is the essence full of Beauty. We are 
not here speaking of beautiful things, that is, 
things that please the eye, and thereby arouse 
a pleasant sensation, so that one says, they are 
beautiful. Neither is it the Beautiful in thought 
which pleases the mental conception, but rather 
is it that Ideal Beauty the very thought of which 
ravishes the soul for all time and for eternity 
so that it can never be whole again. All beauty is 
but a symbol of this transcendent, Divine Beauty. 
It is the Absolute Essence of Beauty. Beauty 
conceived as Essence, not as a thing. The Greeks 
had three Goddesses each of whom represented 
a definite aspect of their ideal of beauty. Aph- 
rodite, who was the epitome of the beauty that 
appeals to the senses. Athene, who was the epit- 
ome of the beauty that appeals to the mind, and 
Hera, the epitome of that majestic grandiose* 
beauty that ravishes the soul, but each of these 
was but a manifestation of that Essential Beauty 
that is of the essence of Ku, the Beautiful Mother 
of all. The Beautiful is the very essence of Ku. 
It is Her esthetieism, *so to speak. Her Heart in 
another aspect. In a still higher sense, this 



110 PHILOSOPHIA EEBMETICA 

Beauty is Her Idealism, that which makes Her 
ever strive to be Herself and to surpass Herself. 
It is Ithe Absolute Beauty of Her Essence, and 
as such is it the Quintessence of Ku, the Heart of 
God. One whose soul has for an instant grasped 
the fleeting vision of that transcendent, essential 
Beauty will never be able to see beauty in any- 
thing else, and will be haunted by that Beatific 
Vision through all eternity, until he has been able 
to see it as It is. This Beauty essence, is also 
the essence of the Good, and they are one essence, 
not two. 

There is no Good that can be got from ob- 
jects in the world. For all the things that fall 
beneath the eye are image-things and pictures 
as it were ; while those that do not meet [the 
eye are the realities], especially the [essence] 
of the Beautiful and Good. 

The objects that are in the world will none of 
them ever lead one unto the Gnosis of the Good. 
They do not contain any of Good, and therefore 
none of Good can ever be derived from them. 
All the objects of sense are mere images and pic- 
tures. The realities that are back of these images 
and pictures, and that are imaged and pictured in 
these objects, are beyond the range of the senses, 
and never make any impression upon them because 
of the invisibility in which these realities ever 
abide. Here is the great mistake which so many 
people make. They think that the objects of a 
material nature are the realities, and that the 
immaterial is an illusion, whereas, just the re- 
verse is the case. The intangible and immaterial, 
is the real, while the tangible and the material is 
but the illusive and the mirage of this reality. 
To see the apparent beauty in the picture of a 
pretty woman, and take this for the beauty of 
the woman herself is similar to thinking that the 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 111 

—^— —^— ■ ' ' i.— ■— — ^— — ^— i 

apparent beauty of the objects in the world is 
the real beauty. But above all the realities that 
we can conceive or above all that are, the most 
real of them all are the essence of the Beautiful 
and Good. There is not an essence of the Beauti- 
ful and an essence of the Good, but on the con- 
trary there is one essence that is in itself, Abso- 
lute Beauty and Absolute Goodness. They are 
one in essence. This One Essence of Absolute 
Beauty and Absolute Goodness, is the One Abso- 
lute Eeality. All else is merely an appearance. 
Divine Beauty and Divine Goodness are identical 
terms, and they are each identical with Divinity, 
there is absolutely no distinction. Therefore see 
that thou dost never separate the Beautiful and 
the Good, for if thou dost, thou shalt impious be. 
Also, see that thou dost never separate them 
from God, for if so, again wilt thou be impious. 
Never attribute reality to anything save the es- 
sence of the Beautiful and the Good, for this 
would be an impiety. Never attribute this es- 
sence of the Beautiful and the Good to anything 
else save Ku, for she alone is this essence and do 
thou never deny to Her this essence of Absolute 
Beauty and absolute Good. Never be guilty of 
calling anything save Her Beautiful or Good. 
She is the Pleroma of all Beauty, and hence there 
is no Beauty left for any one else save Her. She 
is All Beauty. Neither is there Goodness in! 
any one else save Her, for she is the Pleroma of 
the Good and there is no Goodness left for any 
one else save Her alone. She is at once therefore, 
the Pleroma both of the Beautiful and the Good, 
and they are one, and identical with Her essence. 
She is the essence of the Beautiful and the Good. 
She is the Beautiful and the Good essence. One 
essence is there which is at once, the Maker, the 
Mother, the Beautiful and the Good, all spon- 
taneously and simultaneously, and this essence 
is Ku. 



112 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

Just as the eye cannot see God, so can it 
not behold the Beautiful and Good. For that 
they are integral parts of God, wedded to 
Him alone, inseparate familiars, most beloved, 
with whom God is Himself in love, or they 
with God. 

As the eye cannot see God, therefore it cannot 
behold the Beautiful and the Good, because there 
is no Beauty and no Good save in God. There 
is no Beauty save the Beauty of Ku, and there 
is no Good save the Goodness of Ku. Just as we 
may speak of a woman as being both beautiful 
and good, can we separate her beauty and her 
goodness from her, and see them as beauty and 
goodness independent of the woman whom we 
think is beautiful? We say that red lips, rosy 
cheeks, blue eyes, Titian hair, a fair complexion 
make a beautiful woman, but would the red, the 
blue, the titian and the rose color be beautiful if 
they were simply shown in strips of paper of those 
colors ? The beauty of a beautiful woman is seen 
in the woman, but would not be seen as such 
beauty apart from her. Therefore, Beauty exists as 
the Beauty of Ku, separated from Her, it would 
cease to be Beautiful, it lives as Beauty only in 
Her, as Her Beauty, a Beauty that cannot exist 
apart from Her. She is perfectly Beautiful, and 
perfect Beauty is the Beauty of Ku. Even so, 
when we speak of a good woman, can we think 
of that goodness apart from the woman? Can 
we think of this womanly goodness in the ab- 
stract? Does not what we term goodness in man, 
cease to exist when we separate it from the life 
of the man? Must not goodness be active in 
order that it may be goodness at all? Even so 
Good exists or subsists only as the Goodness of 
Ku. If it were separated from Ku, It would at 
once cease to be Good. Therefore both the Beau- 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 113 

tiful and the Good are nothing other than the 
activity of the Essence of Ku. They are Her 
Goodness and Her Beauty and nothing else be- 
sides. They are integral parts of Her very Esse, 
without them She would not be Ku. With them 
anything that possessed them would be Ku, hence 
they can be found in nothing but Her Essence. 
They are Her Graces, like the Beauty, Truth, 
Love, Modesty, Chastity, Conscience and Good- 
ness of a woman in whom all of these conditions 
are present. Ku is in love with Her Beauty and 
Her Goodness. Dearest of all are They to Her. 
She is beloved of Her Beauty and her Goodness. 
They are Her very Self. They could not be apart 
from Her, and She could not be apart from Her 
Beauty and Her Truth. Beauty and Goodness 
are the Essence of Ku, just as She is the Esse 
of the Beautiful and the Good. In Her alone do 
they subsist, just as in Her Beauty and Her 
Goodness alone does She subsist. Wouldst thou 
see the Beautiful and the Good? Then behold 
Ku, for there alone wilt thou find them. 



LESSON X. 
The Gnosis of The Good. 

5. If thou canst God conceive, thou shalt 
conceive the Beautiful and Good, transcend- 
ing Light, made lighter than the Light by 
God. That Beauty is beyond compare, inimi- 
tate that Good, e'en as God is Himself. 

As, then, thou dost conceive of God, con- 
ceive the Beautiful and Good. For they can- 
not be joined with aught of other things that 
live, since they can never be divorced from 
God. 

Seek'st thou for God, thou seekest for the 
Beautiful. One is the Path that leadeth unto 
It — Devotion joined with Gnosis. 

If thou canst God conceive, thou shalt con- 
ceive the Beautiful and Good, transcending 
Light, made lighter than the Light by God. 
That Beauty is beyond compare, inimitate 
that Good, e'en as God is Himself. 

No one can conceive of the Beautiful and the 
Good unless he can conceive of God. To con- 
ceive of the Beautiful and the Good is to conceive 
of God. To conceive of God is to conceive of the 
Beautiful and the Good. They are One, and in 
no sense diverse. They are one absolute Iden- 
tity. That Beauty and Good transcends Light. 
The Light here indicated is the Ultimate Divine 
Light, and even that is not so light as the Beau- 
tiful and the Good, for the Divine Light is made 
by the Beauty and the Goodness of Ku, it is one 

115 



ne PHILOSOPHIA HERMETIC A 



of the first expressions of the Beautiful and the 
Good in Ku. Divine Beauty is in fact the Soul 
of the Divine Light. Nothing can ever be com- 
pared with that Beauty. It has nothing that 
in any way compares with it. And just as Beauty 
is beyond compare, so is it utterly impossible 
for any one or anything to ever imitate the Di- 
vine Goodness. They alike subsist in Ku, and 
there alone. No more can anyone imitate this 
Goodness than he can God Himself or rather Her- 
self as this is Ku of which we are speaking. No 
more can there be another in whom there is this 
Good or this Beauty than there can be another 
Absolute Unmanifest God. They are entirely 
separated from all else. This Trinity, of Ku, 
Her Beauty and Her Goodness, stand absolutely 
alone and without a second. 

As, then, thou dost conceive of God, con- 
ceive the Beautiful and Good. For they can- 
not be joined with aught of other things that 
live, since they can never be divorced from 
God. 

Just as one thinks of God, so must he think of 
the Beautiful and the Good. In so far as he is 
able to conceive of God, so will he be able to con- 
ceive of the Beautiful and the Good, but no far- 
ther. Our ability to appreciate the Beautiful and 
the Good is absolutely conditioned by our ability. 
to conceive of and appreciate the perfection of 
the Unmanifest God, for they are absolutely the 
same. Think therefore of them as one and indi- 
visible. The Trinity of Ku consists of Her Fab- 
rication, or Motherhood, Her Beauty and her 
Goodness, and they are co-equal and co-eternal 
and indivisible. 

Seek'st thou for God, thou seekest for the 



PHILOSOPHIA EERMET1CA 117 

Beautiful. One is the Path that leadeth unto 
It — Devotion joined with Gnosis. 

What is the quest of all life? The Moralist 
seeks for Goodness. The Artist seeks for Beauty. 
The Philosopher seeks for Truth or Wisdom. 
The man of Action seeks for Power. All else is 
pain, these are the only quests that are worth 
while, and those who seek them are the only 
ones worthy of our mention in all the human race. 
The others are merely swine who seek beastly 
gratification, or slaves who merely seek to keep 
alive. All the real men, are those who seek for 
Wisdom, Eighteousness, Power or Beauty. Where 
will the Seeker find that which he -seeks? In God 
alone. And also, the Mystic who seeks after 
God will find Him only in the Beautiful and the 
Good. They are One, and hence must be sought 
as one. The great trouble is, so many seek God 
as a Person, and of course they find Him not, for 
there is no such Being as a Personal God. He 
must be sought not as Person but as Principle, 
and if we seek Him as Principle, we must have 
some conception of the nature of the Principle 
we are seeking, before we commence the search, 
otherwise we will not know what to look for, and 
hence we may find Him and yet fail to recognize 
Him. We must seek for God as Absolute Beauty, 
Absolute Good, Absolute Wisdom and Absolute 
Power. It is in these Principles that God Abides. 
Divine Goodness and Divine Beauty are in Ku, 
the Mother. Also is She God or Energizing Will, 
that Energy from which all Power doth come, 
therefore, in Her must one seek for all Power. 
Absolute Wisdom is from the Mind or the Father 
working in conjunction with the Mother or Ku, 
for the Thought of the Mind becomes Wisdom 
only when it has been clothed with Substance, and, 
energized by Will. Therefore, in Ku is to be 



118 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

sought and found that which will satisfy the 
Quest of all the Seekers. "When they have found 
their Goal, they will have found God. All is 
summed up in the Beautiful, hence all should seek 
for the Beautiful, that is for the Beauty of Ku, 
the Beautiful Grace of the Mother. While we may 
see this Beauty in different ways, some may 
seek the Beautiful Good, others the Beautiful 
Wisdom, others the Beautiful Power, and yet 
others the Beautiful Beauty, yet all must seek 
the Beautiful. There is but one Path that leadeth 
unto it. As it is one thing that is to be searched 
out, there must be but one Path to travel. The 
Path of Devotion will in every instance fail, be- 
cause it develops Devotion but not Wisdom. The 
Path of Wisdom will fail because it develops Wis- 
dom without Devotion. The Path of Action will 
fail, because it develops neither Devotion or Wis- 
dom. None of the Marghas of Hindooism will ever 
bring one to the Goal at the end of the Quest. 
Then what will lead us into the bosom and the 
heart of our Mother? There is but one Path 
that will do this. We must tread the Old, Old 
Path, that of Devotion Joined with Gnosis. 

It is very hard to understand the scope of 
Gnosis. It is not knowledge, for knowledge comes 
through experience and observation, and experi- 
ence and observation enter not into the composi- 
tion of Gnosis. Knowledge relates to Things 
and is the foundation of Science. It deals with 
material things. Its field is the sensible kosmos. 
Gnosis concerns itself not with this. Gnosis is 
not W 7 isdom, for Wisdom comes through Eeason 
and Logic, it is the source of Philosophy, and 
Philosophy is not Gnosis. Philosophy is related 
to Ideas. Its field is the Intelligible Kosmos, and 
Gnosis deals not with this. Gnosis is not Intui- 
tion, for Intuition is the co-worker with Eeason. 
Gnosis is God-knowledge, it deals with God and 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETIGA 119 

the Divine Intelligence, it is the Knowledge that 
comes from the Mind. Gnosis is born in one, 
when the Pure and Spotless Eye of the Truth is 
born in him. One does not investigate and at- 
tain Gnosis. One does not Eeason out Gnosis. 
One simply knows Gnosis, without any process 
whatsoever. When the Light of God shines into 
the Soul and Illumines it with Its Eadiance, then 
has Gnosis been born within him. It comes in no 
other way. No one can ever teach Gnosis to an- 
other. We can only teach the pupil those things 
which will evolve him unto the point where he 
will contact the Light, and it will shine into his 
soul and thus confer upon him Gnosis. No one 
in possession of Gnosis will ever try to teach it 
to another, he will merely try to develop his 
spiritual nature unto the point where he may 
attain Gnosis by Its being born in him. Gnostics 
are born, they are never made, and yet this birth 
is spiritual and never physical. However, great 
as is Gnosis, it alone will never lead one unto the 
Beautiful. To do this it must have Devotion 
joined unto it. This Devotion must be single- 
hearted Devotion to the Beautiful and the Good. 
Until the Ideal of perfect Beauty has become the 
all dominant passion of life through time and 
through eternity, this Devotion has not been at- 
tained. And also until the ideal of the Perfect 
Good has become the abiding love of the heart, 
a devouring flame that nothing in all the worlds 
can ever quench, in time and in eternity, Devotion 
has not been attained. When this perfect Devotion 
unto Ideal Beauty and Ideal Good as One, has 
been joined unto Gnosis, one has entered the Old, 
Old Path. After entering this Path, one must 
become his Ideal of the Beautiful and the Good 
as well as of the Truth, and then in time he will 
find the Beautiful, and when he has found that, 
he will have found God. When he has found 



120 PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETIGA 

God, lie will have found Ku, the Beginningless and 
the Endless Mother of all. This is the one Path 
which thou must tread, Seeker, if thou wouldst 
reach the Beautiful and the Good and thereby 
God the one and only One, Thus wilt thou find thy 
ever Beautiful, and ever Good Mother the Mother 
Divine, Immortal Ku. Dost thou thrill within 
thyself? Does thy heart burn within thee at this 
thought? Dost thou vibrate from head to foot 
at thought of this quest? Does a flame of devour- 
ing love spring up within thee, and spread 
through thy every fiber, and consume every cell 
of thy being, at thought of this search? Then 
art thou called unto the quest for the Beautiful, 
and hast already entered upon thy search for 
the Gnosis of the Good. 

6. And thus it is that they who do not know 
and do not tread Devotion's Path, do dare to 
call man beautiful and good, though he have 
ne'er e'en in his visions seen a whit that's 
Good, but is enwrapped with every kind of 
bad, and thinks the bad is good, and thus doth 
make unceasing use of it, and even feareth 
that it should be ta'en from him, so straining 
every nerve not only to preserve but even to 
increase it. 

Such are the things that men call good and 
beautiful, Asclepios, — things which we cannot 
flee or hate; for hardest thing of all is that 
we've need of them and cannot live without 
them. 

Those who do not know anything about Devo- 
tion's Path, and hence do not tread it, owing to 
their total ignorance of the True Beauty and the 
true Good, dare to call man beautiful and Good. 
In this they do prove their ignorance and their 



PHILOSOPHIA HEBMETICA 121 

impiety. This proves that they have not the 
faintest inkling of true Beauty and Goodness. 
If they had they would never see anything either 
Beautiful or Good in man. They are unable to 
even conceive of anything transcending the quali- 
ties of the human. It is for this reason that in 
their ignorance they attribute Beauty and Good- 
ness to man, seeing that they know nothing at 
all of either, they call that beautiful and good, 
which is the highest that they can comprehend. 
In this they prove that they are of that ungodly 
throng, who have no God. Man as a rule has 
never even in his visions seen a whit that is Good. 
It is something of which he is incapable even of 
dreaming. He is not only incapable of seeing a 
whit of the good, in his dreams; but his entire 
nature is completely enwrapped with every kind 
of bad, so that he is incapable of penetrating 
this blanket of the bad, and hence cannot see 
beyond it. So thoroughly is he blinded that he 
thinks that the bad is good. Thus we see that 
such a man has no means of knowing the dif- 
ference between the good and the bad. The great- 
est fallacy in the world is the idea that conscience 
will guide man aright, and that in this way he 
can attain a knowledge of the difference between 
good and evil. The facts in the matter are that 
the human conscience is bad, and that it will in 
every instance guide man into following the bad. 
It never fails to lead him into the bad. Instead 
of being a safe guide, it is ever the case of the 
blind leading the blind, and hence they both fall 
into the ditch of total badness together. The 
conscience of every man is totally bad until he 
has entered Devotion's Path and has attained 
Gnosis. This alone can lead him to the point 
where he will have an apprehension of the Good. 
Only Gnostics are able to know the difference be- 
tween Good and Evil. From this we can see that 



122 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

conscience is never to be depended upon : but only 
is Gnosis able to lead one aright. Owing to this 
misleading conscience of theirs, and their total 
inability to see the good, they, taking the bad for 
good, make unceasing use of the bad. This of 
course means that never in a single instance, 
their whole life long, do they ever make use 
of a single good thing. The doctrine of total de- 
pravity is therefore perfectly correct, for if a 
man has not even the capacity to know the dif- 
ference between good and bad, and always thinks 
that the bad is good, it follows that he will never 
do any good deed, but will at all times do the bad, 
thinking that he is doing the good. The entire 
life of such a man is made up of a totality of bad 
deeds. The remedy is Gnosis, and that alone will 
save man from the bad. Not only is man unceas- 
ingly making use of the bad: but is fearful that 
this bad may be taken from him, clinging to it at 
all tinles as the dearest thing of life. All his life 
long, he strains every nerve, not only to retain 
all the bad that he has but to continually increase 
the sum of the bad that he has. So he is not sat- 
isfied with always being as bad as he is, and never 
growing any better, but he ever strives with all 
the power at his disposal to grow worse and worse 
all the time. This is the tragedy of our lives that 
we ever cultivate the bad that is in us, and thus 
make it grow more and more. 

Unfortunately, these bad and ugly things which 
men call good and beautiful, and which are cer- 
tainly most undesirable, cannot be fled from or 
hated, though they should be feared and hated 
above all things ; seeing that it is those very bad 
and ugly things that separate us from the Beau- 
tiful and the Good. The hardest thing of all, and 
the greatest curse connected with our life down 
here is the fact that we have need of those very 
bad and ugly things, and so long as we remain 
in the body, we cannot live without them. Our 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 123 

very life is so wrapped up in them, that life is 
impossible without those very things. The great- 
est curse of all is, therefore, embodied existence, 
and our only salvation is freedom from the body. 
The curse that was placed upon man was there- 
fore, incarnation in the physical body, and he 
will not have been saved until he has attained 
freedom from incarnate life. Hence it follows 
that so long as a man lives in the world, he can 
never attain the Beautiful and the Good. What 
then should he do? There is but one course open 
to him; while living in the body and thus being 
at all times enwrapped with bad, he should ever 
seek the Beautiful and the Good by striving after 
it, and treading Devotion's Path. In other words, 
with Heart and Mind he should serve the Beau- 
tiful and the Good, though with his body, he 
must of necessity serve the bad. There is no 
other course open to him. In his physical life, 
no one can avoid an evil life, for the life of the 
body is evil per se; but the intelligence and the 
Devotion of the heart may rise above it. Thus it 
is that the wise have ever attached a great deal 
more importance to Spiritual Thought than they 
have to a moral life, seeing that the moral life re- 
lates itself to the body, and as the body is en- 
wrapped with bad, it follows that his morals must 
be bad. In other words, the most exemplary 
morality will always be a bad morality. The Good 
cannot be expressed in conduct, as all conduct is 
of necessity bad. The Good Life is a life of 
Ideals, not one of actions, hence the relative good- 
ness of any man is to be determined not by what 
he does, but by the purity and spirituality of his 
ideals. We can readily see the inherent badness 
of human society, in the fact that it cares very 
little about the ideals of any one, and attaches 
the greatest importance to his conduct, some- 
thing that can never be of any great importance. 
The entire moral code is so constructed as to 



124 PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 

make ample provision for all of these bad things. 
Labor is one of those bad things, and hence it 
is supposed to be the duty of every one to work 
himseli to death, and if one shirks this duty of 
working himself to death, and becomes indiffer- 
ent to labor, he is immoral. Improvidence is 
immoral, because it is the duty of every one to 
accumulate as much of this world's goods as pos- 
sible. To dissipate what he has is immoral, 
therefore one should never live above his in- 
come, and hence extravagance is immoral. One 
is a public benefactor if he uses his intelligence 
to increase the wealth of the country, which is 
also bad. He is immoral if he neglects his oppor- 
tunity to do so, for then he is wasting his talents. 
Theft and dishonesty are also said to be immoral, 
because they deprive another of his possessions. 
This entire world is made up of falsehood, see- 
ing that the false pretends to be the true; hence, 
it is impossible for any one to lie about any mat- 
ter of fact, seeing that all facts are in themselves 
lies ; and yet it is immoral to lie, because we must 
preserve this particular fabric of lies that we 
have in the world. It is immoral for one not to 
provide for the material wants of his family, but 
as a matter of fact they all relate to the bad, and 
the other things are much more important. Char- 
ity is considered very moral, because it keeps the 
body alive, which is bad; hence, charity is in 
itself bad. It is moral to minister to the desires 
and passion, and as they are bad, this is also bad. 
The entire fabric of sex morality has been ar- 
ranged to regulate the gratification of lust in such 
a way as to give the greatest measure of sexual 
satisfaction, and hence to provide for the bad, 
hence sex morality is also bad. Our entire moral 
code has been arranged in such a manner as to 
make the best possible citizens out of the people, 
which means to make the worst possible men and 
women out of them. There has never been the 



PHILOSOPHIA EERMETICA 125 

slightest attention paid to cultivating the Good in 
man, for the Good has nothing to do with this 
world. In order to become a good citizen, one 
must become a bad man, and if one becomes a 
relatively good man, he is therefore no good as a 
citizen. The purpose of our entire social struc- 
ture is to make bad men, and above all things, to 
keep all goodness away from them. A good man 
is therefore never a moral man, and also a moral 
man can never have a trace of goodness about 
him. Man must, therefore, serve the bad, by 
living a moral life in his body, while serving the 
Good by approaching as near It as possible 
through the exercise of his Intelligence and his 
Heart. The dual life is the only one for him to 
live, seeing that he lives in two worlds, in the In- 
telligible Kosmos, in his soul, and in the Mate- 
rial Kosmos, in his body. It is a mistake to ever 
think that the twain will meet. However, I would 
say that it is best to reduce the badness of the 
body to the minimum, and to increase the good- 
ness of the soul to the maximum. In this way 
will he advance the fartherest on Devotion's 
Path, and thus through Gnosis, reach closer to 
the Beautiful and the Good than in any other 
way. However, let him never forget, that the 
percentage of Goodness in him is to be measured 
not by the actions and habits of his body, but by 
the Ideals and Devotion of his Soul. 



PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 127 

A Course of Ten Lessons on Hermetic Phi- 
losophy, Giving the Text of the Sermons 
of Hermes Trismegistos, Entitled 

THOUGH UNMANIFEST GOD IS 
MOST MANIFEST, 

and 

IN GOD ALONE IS GOOD AND 
ELSEWHERE NOWHERE 

Together With Ample Interpretations, Show- 
ing in Full the Esoteric Meaning of These 
Two Great Sermons, and Giving the 
Esoteric Key to the Mysteries of 
Hermetic Philosophy; Being 
an Introduction to the 
Study of the Phi- 
losophy of Al- 
chemy. 



By Dr. A. S. Raleigh 

(Hach-mactzin El Dorado Can) High Priest 

of the Heart of Heaven 

HERMETIC PUBLISHING COMPANY 

San Francisco, Calif. 

STERLING PUBLISHING COMPANY 

Chicago, U. S. A. 



HERMETIC WORKS BY A. S. RALEIGH 



Tb « PHILOSOPHY 



of ALCHEMY 



THE 4 GREAT W™ MOPh,h Hermetica," dealing with the philosophical aspect of 



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The Divine Energy 

The Creative Energy 

The Creative Will 

The Law of Universal and of In- 
dividual Generation 

The Tenet of Silence 

God-like Man — the All-Soul and the 
Individual Souls 

The Progress and Evolution of Souls 

Metempsychosis 

Gnosis — The End of Science and the 
Philosophers' Stone 

The Master- Key 

The Source of All 

The Law of Causation 

How to Master the Laws of Nature 

Man, the Lord of Creation, and How 
He May Come Into His Own 

The Way Up to the Mount 

The Alchemists' Secret 
The Red Powder, the White Powder, 
and the Mystic Water 



PARTIAL CONTENTS 
Alchemical 



Gold 

The Ladder of the Gods 
The Alchemical Spiral 
How Man May Go to Heaven and 

Bring Back Its Secrets 
The Life of the Hierarch 
The Super-Man 

Dwelling in Heaven and Earth at 
Once 

How to Become a God-Man 
God Is Man and Man Is God 
The Law of Self Realization 
The Will to Power 
When We Dead Awaken 
The Life of the Alchemist 
The Chemist of the Will 
Man the Saviour 

The Science of Regeneration 
The Rulers of the World 
The Elias of the Arts 



SCIEMTIFIC HERMETICA 

An Introduction to the Nature of All Things. 

The sequel to "Lessons in Hermetic Philosophy." Presents the text of sermons on 
"The Introduction to the Gnosis of the Nature of All Things," and "The Sacred Ser- 
mon," together with the Esoteric Key to their meaning-. The official TEXT BOOK 
OF HERMETIC SCIENCE and Introduction to the STUDY OF ALCHEMY. 

PARTIAL CONTENTS 

The Nature and Factors of Motion The Relation Between God, the God- 

The Nature of Space and Force 

The Motion of the Spheres 

The Origin of Orbital Motion 

Centers of Gravity 

The True Law of Dynamics 

The Bodiless 

The Fallacy of Gravitation — a Phe- 
nomenon, Not a Law 

The Motive Power of the Universe 

not Gravitation but Repulsion 
The Birth of the Gods 
The Creation of the Universe 



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head and Nature 

The Divine Creation 

The Cyclic Gods and Their Creation 

The Law of Cycles 

Re-Incarnation 

The Mundane Creation not by God 
but of Cyclic Gods 

Constitution of Matter, Force and 
Spirit 

The Religion of the Mind 



How Man May be Superior to Natural Law 



Tbe HERMETIC ART 

An Introduction to the Art of Alchemy. 

Preliminary instructions showing- the principles that must be made use of in any 
effort to make a practical use of Gnosis as a means of dominating all physical condi- 
tions — the limitations of the physical environment — the bondage of the physical body 
— and the means of subjugating it to the dominion of the Soul. 

PARTIAL CONTENTS 

™ e H5X 0f *°} X lZ A ' chem y The Nature of the Thought. Both 

The Alchemy of the Soul Universal and Individual 

The Transmutation of the Body The Nature of <?pn«P and aii <:...„ 

Th^.^mmortanty of all Existing X U^^^lLiS^ 



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The Law of Metamorphosis 

The Law of Transmutation 

The Astral Life of All Things 

The Visibility and Invisibility of All 

Dis-carnation and Re-incarnation 

God the Norm of All 

Nature— The Body of God 

The Art of Transmutation and 

Metamorphosis 
The Immortality of the Soul and 

the Deathless Life 



The World-Will 

The Creative Thought 

Thought and Mind 

The Relation of Thought, Mind and 
Sense to THE GREAT WORK 

Matter and Substance— Their Rela- 
tion to the Implements of the 
GREAT WORK 



The Master-Mind 

Full and Complete Instructions for the Consummation of the Hermetic 
Art, and the Path to Mastership Through the Master-Thought 



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™* SHEPHERD* MEM 

subject. 



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Egyptian Kosmogony 
Theogony and Anthropology 
Descent of Spirit Into Matter 
Creation of the Universe 
Anthropos Doctrine 
Divine Pedigree of Man 
Origin of the Human Race 
Fall of Man 
Human Evolution 
Way of Salvation 
Seven Rulers 
Birth of the Gods 
Man as the Lord of Creation and 

Master of Nature „»«,■■ 

Why We Should Not Obey But Rule 

the Laws of Nature 



PARTIAL CONTENTS 

Part ' - - c ♦„ 

Human Determinism Superior to 

Natural Determinism 

Esoteric Key to the Mystery of God 

Logos 

Formative Mind 

Moist Nature 

Kosmic Fire 

Kosmos and the Universe 

Gucumatz 

Anthropos 

Origin of the Human Race 

Initiation of Kosmic Thought by 

Mind 

Nature of the Father 

Bi-Sexuality of All Things 

Androgynous Man 



The Way of Return to God-the-Mind 



"PATLT 2 

Historical outline of the Aaclent ^tl^tian- the ^^^ ^S^Tfe^e^o 
deans, the Egyptians the Nagas ^ and the Aryan ^ E arth. The Origin of the 
Took, the Atlantian Hidd< m Wisdorr To M PaHa of the ^th.^ ^ ^.^ 
Gnosis, the Ancient Mystenes, uie ^&*£'- 1 '* , Ampriran Indians were the preservers 
Medicine Lodge, with ^e ^position of how ^f^nS-and not India, 
of the. ancient civilization which is today tone — be tween the Culture of the 
^T'a^thTS^i^Hnfh^^e £k5?WSl£i and philosophy is to he 
found in the Indian race is revealed. .- . 



WOMAN** SUPERWOMAN 

-are the remnants of : a Jarbaroua -P™™^;. woma nhood, and to take her proper 
The message calls upon hei to assenigr wo , ^ .^ RTJLER It 

& e ^leTZ?e^^ in a S * iHtUal Way ' ^ t0 

incarnate THE WILL TO P , OW ?i?" lQtAnt nowers and in this way become the Super- 

W^CZ^^tL^Z^fg^^t^^^ Positive. dvnatnic. 

realize that she is the true Alchem,st JLni the Savwuo^e l( _ and take her 

^efararc^ix^oflr^utule^^ro^^er Will bring to pass all of her 
Heal I S t shows that the Goddesses operate through W, = and that ttogggj* 
SSffi ^S^^^i^Sr^&^O^revSa fo her. and will also And HOW 
she is to make her IDEALS real. 



from a Hermetic 



PART 

Stand 



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Form of 



Feminism 

point 
Woman of the Future 
Matriarchy the Coming 

Government 
Daughters of the Woman 
Super-Woman 
Seed of the Woman 
The Divine Feminine 
Mothers of the Christ-Child 
Mother of God 
Virgin Motherhood 
Divine Motherhood 
The Mothers . , 

The Positive Omnipotence of 

Feminine Will Force 
How Woman May Set Free 

Creative Will- Power and Bring Into 

Manifestation Whatever She Wills 



the 
Her 



IAL CONTENTS 

Woman the True Alchemist 
How Woman Can Regenerate Her- 
self and Others 
The Chemist of the Will and How 
Woman May Rule the World 
Through Her Spiritual Potency 
Mothering the Race the Burden of 

Woman 
The Future Religion of the World 

a Pure Feminism 
Woman the Architect of the Future 
Dawn of the Age of Woman 
The Militant Feminist a Prophetess 

of God . _ ... 

The Reign of the Goddess is Possible 
Only Through the Reign of Woman 
Husbands Should Obey Their Wivw 



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AND 



OTHERS 



T O 



FOLLOW 



Tbt STANZAS f DZYM 



Theogenesis 

The real third volume of THE SECRET DOCTRINE. The Stanzas of Theo- 
genesis are the famous nine stanzas, sequel to those published in "THE SECRET 
DOCTRINE" by Madame H. P. Blavatsky. Hence, these Stanzas, tog-ether with the 
Commentary, constitute the real Third Volume of The Secret Doctrine, the so-called 
third volume published by the Theosophical Society being no part of The Secret 
Doctrine, as it deals with separate and distinct subjects. 

These Stanzas, together with their Commentaries, disclose the work of Evolution 
during the Sixth and Seventh Rounds, and indicate the work of forming the Sixth and 
Seventh Root Races, also the coming of the Tenth or Kalki Avatar, and showing that 
He is now on the Earth, and that the Sixth Round commenced in 1881. It has been 
given to the world for this purpose alone. 

A revelation of the forces working for the transformation of humanity into God- 
hood. The guide-book for all aspirants who desire to pass through this period of 
transition and become members of the Sixth Root Race. 

It contains a prophecy of the present European War, written in 1912, dealing 
with the present time and all prophecies as they are now being fulfilled. An official 
work for Hermetics. 

PARTIAL CONTENTS 



The Beginning of the End 
The Close of the Fifth Round 

The End of the Fifth Root Race 
The Aftermath of the Fifth Round 
The Dawning of the Sixth Round 
The Death of Fohat 
The Sixth Round and the Sixth 

Root Race 
The Opening of the Seventh Round 
The Regeneration of the Earth 
The Kalki Avatara 
The Descent of the Great Mother 

The Descent of the Dragon of Wis- 
dom 



The Incarnation of the Diamond 

Sou led Host 
The End of Illusion 
The Sons of Will and Yoga 
The Millennium 
The Sons of the Fire 
The Fulfillment of Mother Shipton's 

Prophecy 
The Fateful Years— 1881, 1910, 1919, 

1921 and 1925 

The History of the Hermetic Broth- 
erhood in Atlantis,. Yucatan, Ak- 
kad, Chaldea, Egypt, India and 
Persia, and its Relation to the 
Ancient Mysteries 



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PHILOSOPHIA HERMETICA 



An Introduction to the Philosophy of Alchemy. 

These lessons constitute the first serious attempt to make known to the world the 
basic principles underlying the Magnum Opus, containing the text of the sermons en- 
titled, "Though Unmanifest God Is Most Manifest" and "In God Alone Is Good — Else- 
where Nowhere/' together with the Esoteric Key to their meaning. The absolute 
unity of Pantheism, Poletheism, Monotheism, and Tritheism is revealed. 



PARTIAL CONTENTS 



Mystery of the God Beyond All Name 

Manifestation of God 

The One and Only One 

The Nature of the Good 

The Pleroma of the Good 

The Pleroma of the Bad 

Ku, or the Divine Essence 

Motherhood of God 

The Art of Creation 

God and Nature 

Salvation Through the Gnosis 

The Philosophy and 



Natural Evidences of the Nature of 

God 
God and the Gods 
Human Generation 
The Beautiful 

The Gnosis of the Mind 
The Gnosis of the Good 
The Old, Old Path 
The Worship of the Father 
The Secret of Alchemy and 
Mystic Life 
Key to the Art of Creation 



the 



8vo. (Octavo), 
127 pages. 
Bound in 
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(Autograph 
Edition) of 
Private Lessons 
by the Author. 
$10.00 
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Publishers 

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